The mythical Tower of Babel represented an endeavor so great that it rivaled the heavens.  According to the bible, a united humanity speaking a single language participated in the building of the tower.  That’s the future of the world wide web envisioned by Dr. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the internet.

Dr. Berners-Lee in this impassioned TED talk on what he calls Linked Data describes an internet with open databases that can be linked with one another online to facilitate research and learning.  Wikipedia is perhaps a simplistic example of such an entity but at a very minute scale.

Key principles of Linked Data include:

1. Providing valuable information that is structured (or tagged) using meta data
2. The use of URIs to identify sources of information
3. Accessibility to the data by people and user agents via the HTTP protocol
4. The inclusion of links or URIs to additional, related sources of information to faciliate discovery

While it appears Dr. Lee’s vision is humanitarian in nature given he wants organizations to share their information extrinsically to the public at large this idea is valuable to corporations who implement this intrinsically.  This is founded on the principles of Data Democracy which I wrote about on the HubSpot blog sometime back.

If you have any interest in the internet I highly recommend you should watch the video to get a glimpse of the future. It’s great content and really well delivered!

Photo credit: Thomas Thomas

Last week I was at the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, California. Staring at the pylons of this architectural wonder I marveled how the span supported around 2 million car crossings per month!

There were 3 basic processes being supported here — vehicles traveling northbound, vehicles traveling southbound and the trolls collecting a toll. (I’m going to leave out the jumpers because I didn’t see any!) I could not help but think how this was a perfect analogy for Markitechture.

I’d like to think of Markitechture as this giant bridge supported by mighty pillars of technology with a span that helps support 3 fundamental requirements for marketing today:

1. Connecting people to people
2. Connecting people to information
3. Connecting information to information.

Process management is key to both businesses and people (the vehicles) achieving their respective goals. And these goals can be anything from conducting commerce to social networking. So if process management is the span of Markitechture, the four main supporting pillars would be: databases, applications, communications, and content. More on each of these pillars and process management in a future post. Time to go build. Bye for now!