Ben’s main concern was with the sites out there which are aimed at promoting suicide and even providing instructions. He wanted to create a highly search engine optimised site which would be ranked above such sites on search engines and also include  a petition for visitors to sign with the aim of getting all major Search Engines to blacklist any such sites.

The site is very simple, with most of the work going into writing keyword rich content and matching meta data to the content in order to make the site as search engine friendly as possible. Some CSS3 elements are used, with work-arounds in place in order to degrade gracefully when viewed in older browsers.

I have just discovered the concept of ‘Semantic Web’, having been doing some research into developing a more intelligent search engine for building product specification. Although this seems to be in it’s early stages (even though it was coined back in 1999 by the father of the Web himself, Tim Berners-Lee) this seems to be the natural way forward.

It seems, in my experience, that the Building Industry is very backward with regards to IT as I cannot find any real reference anywhere to the use of Semantic Web in Building Product Specification – correct me if i’m wrong.

If computers could ‘understand’ the meaning of a search term, using Ontologies, then the possibilities are endless. Some even feel that Semantic Web will be the defining feature of ‘Web 3.0′.

Article on ‘The Semantic Web’ by Tim Berners-Le et al at http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-semantic-web&print=true

The Semantic Web – An Introduction: http://infomesh.net/2001/swintro/

W3C Semantic Web Activity: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/