A Guide to The Contextual Web
It's the end of 2008 and everyone on the Web is hurting due to the economy. But we know that things will get better, because slow-downs eventually bury the old and give birth to new evolutionary ways of doing things.
One of these evolutions started quietly in 2008. We are witnessing the rise of a new kind of web: contextual. You might not have heard or thought about it much yet, but you are already using it today. Search remains the killer app on the web, but context is quickly become a viable contender. Why? Because context is what happens instead of search.
Until recently on the web, most sites have not been software - only data, a bunch of flat HTML pages. The software that you used to look at them was, of course, the web browser. The problem was that the browser had no idea what the pages contained, and it did not know what you were doing. Because the browser could not infer your context, it could not help you explore related and relevant information.