It would be easy to say that the 'social' element is still the primary part of today's Web, because the popular products of this era enable you to say what's on your mind (Facebook), what's happening (Twitter), or where you're at (Foursquare). All of these are mostly social activities. But more significantly, these and other products output data that will increasingly be used to build personalized services for you.

How We Went Beyond Social

So how did we arrive at a Web that is less about social and more about you?

After the peak of Web 2.0, we (meaning all of us) began to get overwhelmed with the choice of content available. We thought that we had to actually 'read' as much of that content as possible. So we watched YouTube, chatted on MySpace and Facebook, read blogs, followed lots of people on this new thing called Twitter, and so on. By the end of 2008, we were exhausted by all of this CONTENT. How could we possibly keep up?!

In 2010, we're still struggling to digest all of what social media throws at us. However, a shift has been happening since 2009 which alleviates the problem. We've begun to realize that it's not how much content we consume that is important - it's what we do with all of the social and other data available to us. The social is still important, but the resulting data is - slowly - becoming more important because it can be analyzed, filtered, mashed up, and personalized.

Structured Data & Internet of Things

Two relatively new trends are driving this change.

The first is the increasing amount of data being uploaded to the Web by governments, organizations and people. Much of this data is being structured using Semantic Web technologies like RDFa or microformats. In other words, it is categorized and encoded with meaning that machines can process. Recent examples include US and UK government data, Best Buy's store and product data, and Facebook's Open Graph.

And then we have the Internet of Things - an evolving trend where real-world objects and 'things' are connected to the Internet via technologies such as sensors and RFID tags. Everything from cars to houses to roads and more. The upshot is that the Web is about to experience a data explosion, as billions of sensors and other data input and output devices upload exabytes of new data to the Web.

How do We Use This Data?

If we add together social data from the likes of Facebook and Twitter, data from governments and businesses, and data from sensors and RFID - this is a huge amount of data. Most of it isn't for 'consuming.' Rather, the value of all of this new Web data will be in how it's filtered, mixed together ('mashed up') and personalized in new web services - most of which haven't yet been built.

Adam Greenfield is one of the leading thinkers of the Internet of Things - I interviewed him earlier this year about his book called Everyware. Greenfield recently wrote a post describing a near future scenario for non-technical people using the Web. He posited a use case where his mother would be able to plan a train trip to see her son, by creating an "ad-hoc service" that tapped into the Web and utilized real-time data sources.

In 2010, his mother would have to find and 'read' several different applications in order to plot her travel schedule - and some of that information isn't even currently on the Web. Greenfield envisions a near future where his mother can essentially 'write' her requirements into her mobile or other device - and the Web delivers a personalized schedule to 'read.' You can view a diagram of Adam's concept here (PDF).

Don't Think Social, Think Data

Successful products in the Web 2.0 era had a strong social element: YouTube, MySpace and Flickr were a few relatively early examples. In the current era of the Web, which began to form in early 2009, the focus has shifted from social to data-driven software. Successful products of this era of the Web will be ones that filter, structure and personalize this vast amount of data coming onto the Web.

So if I was an entrepreneur or developer wondering what to build for this era of the Web, I wouldn't be thinking social. I'd be thinking: how can I use all of this data and build on top of it. There are incredible opportunities out there for you.

This current era of the Web doesn't have a name, which is probably a good sign! One thing is for sure though: it's still a read/write Web. Only now you're reading and writing data from much more than just social services. You're increasingly interacting with 'things,' organizations, governments - virtually anything that can connect to the Web.

The latest version of social news site Digg is currently in restricted beta, with an additional 20,000 users added at the beginning of July. The new version adds the ability to "follow" people or publishers via a feature called "My News." This will be the default Digg home page, and it's prompted many to compare the new Digg to Twitter and Facebook. Another big change is that publishers may now automatically submit their content. This changes the game for both power users and publishers, because previously the secret to getting onto the Digg front page was for a power user to submit the story. That's no longer the case.

Up till now, the definition of a "power user" on Digg has been someone with the ability to make stories popular simply by submitting content or "digging" it up. There was also a lot of back-scratching that happened behind the scenes among both power users and publishers: 'You digg my content, I'll digg yours.' Digg has attracted a lot of criticism in the past for these practices inside its community.

Simply put, Digg's power users wielded a lot of power because they dictated which publishers got pushed onto the Digg homepage. Digg is a large source of traffic for publishers, particularly tech news publications. In the past, tech sites like Ars Technica and Engadget have received a hugely disproportionate number of Digg frontpages, compared to other tech sites, since they were favored by power users.

With the new Digg, publishers may opt in to having their articles auto-submitted to Digg via RSS feed. But will this stop the gaming?

How The New Digg Affects Power Users

We spoke to Digg power user JD Rucker, a.k.a. oboy on Digg, to discuss the impact of Digg's changes on his community.

Rucker recently wrote a post entitled The New Digg: A Shift in the Balance of Power, which argued that "the new Digg will make many current 'power users' impotent" but also create opportunities for new types of power users.

In an interview with ReadWriteWeb, JD Rucker explained that "rather than submit [articles], current long-time power users will be able to expose content that they like through their Diggs."

This list of diggs is similar to a list of daily tweets, since people follow what the power user diggs. It's also similar to Facebook, because other users may 'like' what they digg by digging it too.

The idea, said Rucker, is that the power users who succeed at attracting followers will become "tastemakers" - which is the term Digg founder Kevin Rose used when he announced the new Digg in May.

What Happens Behind The Scenes

Many people aren't aware of the amount of "gaming the system" which goes on in the social Web. I consider myself fairly naive about a lot of it. But I know this much: despite the altruistic front of many successful people in the social Web, many of them have gamed their way to the top.

The following is how JD Rucker explained how Digg's power users will (or won't) adjust to the new Digg. It also reveals the power games that are played on the site:

"They [power users] can still network via IM and control publisher accounts to keep themselves relevant, but the vast majority will fail miserably because they won't be able to adjust to the new algo[rithm]. They'll spam, spam, and spam some more until they either give up and move on to other sites or abort operations altogether.

Others are already planning on leaving.

The "savvy" ones who have built-up networks not reliant on IM, [and] who will also have access to multiple and/or strong publisher accounts, will soar."

I asked Rucker what he meant by "control publisher accounts." He replied with this generic example: "Bob Power User, who is getting paid by RandomDiggDependentSite.com, is currently using his and his team's power user accounts to submit." Rucker described this as "a small cottage industry."

That's right, some power users control publisher Digg accounts. This practice will continue on the new Digg.

A Whole New Ballgame: Let The Games Begin...

We like to write about how wonderful the social Web is and how it has improved society and business. That's certainly true, but the Web is also big business, and it is ruthlessly gamed by many social media 'pundits' and publishers alike. The new Digg is partly an attempt to clean up some of that on its site by preventing its power users from controlling the submission of content.

JD Rucker stated in his post that the new Digg showed "guts" because it is such a big change. I agree. The new Digg cleverly mimics Twitter and Facebook, becoming a place where you can 'follow' influencers and publishers to get your daily news fix. What's more, power users now have the opportunity to attract large followings, which is a chance for some of them to become influential personalities.

However, the new Digg won't stop the games of power users and the publishers who glom onto them. There's too much (online) power and money at stake. It's game on again!

Follow ReadWriteWeb on the new Digg

It's an impressive demonstration of how a large, mainstream website can have added meaning and structure.

1. Semantic Web Adoption by Facebook, Best Buy & Others
2. It's All Semantics: Open Data, Linked Data & The Semantic Web
3. The State of Linked Data in 2010
4. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009
5. ReadWriteWeb Interview With Tim Berners-Lee

The BBC World Cup site featured over 700 webpages and was powered by a semantic publishing framework. The site boasted a comprehensive ontology (a map of concepts), that output "automated metadata-driven web pages" created on-the-fly.

Jem Rayfield, Senior Technical Architect, BBC News and Knowledge, explained further:

"The underlying publishing framework does not author content directly; rather it publishes data about the content - metadata. The published metadata describes the world cup content at a fairly low-level of granularity, providing rich content relationships and semantic navigation. By querying this published metadata we are able to create dynamic page aggregations for teams, groups and players."

The basis of this system was an ontology that described how World Cup facts related to each other. For example, "Frank Lampard" was part of the "England Squad" and the "England Squad" competed in "Group C" of the "FIFA World Cup 2010". The ontology also included "journalist-authored assets" such as stories, blogs, profiles, images, video and statistics.

The publishing platform had both manual and automated tagging features. BBC journalists could, for example, tag Frank Lampard in a story about the disallowed goal from England's last-16 loss against Germany. This is a normal part of most modern-day publishing systems (we tag content in this manner here at ReadWriteWeb). But the BBC World Cup site also automatically analyzed journalist content and matched it "against the World Cup ontology." It did this by using what it describes as a "natural language and ontological determiner process." [Update: IBM wrote in to inform us that the technology behind this was IBM LanguageWare.] This is similar to software such as Thomson Reuters' Calais or the new Extractiv product that we reviewed yesterday. In the BBC's case, the resulting tags were moderated before being published.

The BBC used Semantic Web technologies such as RDF and SPARQL to build their World Cup site. The stated goal was to achieve "intelligent mapping of journalist assets to concepts and queries."

The site reportedly served millions of page requests a day throughout the World Cup. The BBC may use this semantic publishing platform for other parts of the BBC sports site; and it will certainly deploy it again for the the London 2012 Olympics.

The official explanatory post has the technical details, should you wish to follow up. Let us know in the comments about other large scale Semantic Web deployments that you know of.

Update: See also The World Cup and a call to action around Linked Data, by the BBC's John O'Donovan. Thanks Georgi Kobilarov for the pointer.

I sat down with Extractiv CEO Shion Deysarkar at the recent Semantic Technology conference in San Francisco, to find out how Extractiv intends to compete with the more well-known and big media backed Calais.

Extractiv is a joint venture between Houston-based web crawling service 80legs and natural language processing company LCC (which created Swingly, a Q&A service).

Deysarkar explained that Extractiv uses technology from both of its parent companies, to crawl the Web for content on a particular topic and then - using natural language processing - transform it into structured data. This video, produced by Extractiv, explains how the service might be used to crawl the Web for stories about smart phones over the past month.

The output of the crawl and analysis can be JSON or XML, two formats commonly used for structured data. Support for RDFa, a popular Semantic Web standard, will be available "soon" according to the company. Extractive also offers an API, allowing customers to bypass the web site.

Extractiv is free to try, but if you'll be a moderate or heavy user of the service then you'll have to pay (the pricing is as yet unavailable on the web site).

Extractiv vs Calais

Deysarkar told ReadWriteWeb that Extractiv is targeting "mid-market Calais customers" - such as media companies or those developing search applications, monitoring services, recommendation engines or aggregators. He also claimed that Extractiv goes beyond what Calais offers, because it can mine sentiment data (which is data about how people feel about products and services).

Extractiv also wants to "provide access to more types of semantic information than any other provider." As CEO of partner company LCC, Andrew Hickl, put it, "if you're interested in baseball pitchers, a generic type like PERSON just won't cut it."

At launch, Extractiv offers about 250 different types of named entities, but it aims to have more than 3000 different entity types by the end of the U.S. summer.

Preparing For the Future of the Web

The product is not aimed at the consumer market, so it's not for the faint hearted and you need to know what to do with all of that XML or JSON data! It also remains to be seen how competitive it is with Calais, which is a proven performer and has many reputable companies as its customers. Some startups have taken on Calais before, but fallen short.

However, there is undoubtedly a need for products like Extractiv and Calais that turn the Web's unstructured data into meaningful, organized content. This is the future of the Web, because there is going to be a large increase in the quantity of data online over the next 5-10 years - and all of that data will need to be structured if we're going to be make the best use of it.

Second was the Nexus One, an iPhone challenger that runs Google's mobile OS, Android. This shows another significant trend of 2010: the increasing market penetration of Android as a smart phone platform competing with the iPhone. Full poll results below...

What all four of the top place getters have in common is that they're all mobile technologies. It's perhaps arguable that the iPad is a mobile device, however it has been mostly used away from people's desks.

The poll listed 10 products or platforms and you were asked to select up to 3. Below is a screenshot of how the poll finished up. Let us know in the comments what other trends you gleaned from these results.

See also: 5 Key Trends of 2010: Half-Year Report for The Web

ReadWriteWeb is privileged to have an engaged community of decision makers and thought-leaders. The community manager's job is to engage with our community, to provide support and help develop it. Read on for more details...

We are looking for someone who is an active user of social media tools (Facebook, Twitter, Digg and StumbleUpon to name just some of the ones important to our site). We're also looking for someone with experience managing online communities, strong writing skills and an analytical mind set. This may suit someone with an online marketing or PR background. But we're open-minded about that, as we're mostly interested in your current use of social media.

This job is a great opportunity to work at the cutting edge of social media. So if you'd like to be a part of one of the leading technology blogs on the Internet, email richard AT readwriteweb.com with the words "Community Manager" in your subject line. If you know someone who may be a good fit for this position, please send them our way.

We'd now like to poll you on which of these - or other - products or platforms has impressed you the most over 2010. You may cast up to 3 votes in the poll below.

Mobile and Real-Time Web have been particularly eventful in 2010, as you'll see below. Augmented Reality and Internet of Things are both early stage trends, but have continued to edge towards the mainstream this year. The movement towards Structured Data has made significant progress in 2010, primarily thanks to RDFa and the adoption of that Semantic Web format by Facebook, Google and other big companies.

The next generation of the iPhone operating system, iPhone OS 4, was launched in April - it included long-awaited support for multitasking. That was followed by the June release of iPhone 4, the new handset.

However, it hasn't all been about the iPhone this year. Perhaps even more notable (although less hyped) has been the continued growth and expansion of Google's Android competitor. It started in January, when Google announced the new Nexus One. Google described it as "Where Web Meets Phone" and called it a "super phone" (ok, so there was hype there too...). Android, Google's mobile OS, has also experienced strong market share growth this year.

The biggest news of the year, though, has undoubtedly been Apple announcing the iPad in late January. This led to a flurry of new apps and a revival of interest in digital magazines.

In terms of non-device innovation, much of the attention has been on location-based social networking services like Foursquare, Gowalla and Brightkite.

While all three were popular during the annual geekfest in Austin, SXSW Interactive, by the half-year mark Foursquare appears to have the most momentum.

Real-Time Web

Twitter and Facebook have dominated the Real-Time Web landscape so far in 2010. Facebook has been under pressure for its controversial privacy changes (that is, more and more of Facebook is being made public), yet it continues to grow market share. Meanwhile Twitter has become more well-known in the mainstream, on the back of news such as Michael Jackson's passing and huge events like the World Cup.

Google tried to get in on the real-time action in February, with the launch of a media sharing service called Google Buzz. Buzz was mostly a damp squib, however. More successful for Google was its integration of Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and other real-time results into its core search product.

There have been some interesting startups to emerge in this space over 2010. For example, Quora - a real-time enabled Q&A site created by Facebook's first CTO Adam D'Angelo. Other products to have caught our eye this year include Collecta, OneRiot, My6Sense and SuperFeedr.

Internet of Things

Internet of Things is when real-world objects are connected to the Internet, often via sensors, barcodes and RFID tags. This was a trend we began exploring in earnest in 2009, when much of the applications were experimental.

In 2010 we've seen commercial applications begin to arise, starting at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January. The main trend we noticed from this CES was web applications being ported to consumer electronics - everything from the technology inside cars to Web-enabled TVs.

Many of our posts on Internet of Things this year have been explanatory, to help you prepare for the expected increase in commercial applications over the next few years. Check out our post on sensors and mobile phones for an example. Also find out why HP thinks sensors will lead to the next big wave of computing.

Augmented Reality

The field of AR has been similarly experimental up till now, so we have again spent a lot of time explaining this trend and putting it in context. An example is Austrian company Wikitude bringing augmented "Worlds" to the iPhone, in February. A wider audience saw AR in April, when the Discovery Channel promoted its docu-drama hit Deadliest Catch with a desktop-based AR ad campaign.

Augmented Reality was a hot topic at the RWW Mobile Summit, in May in Mountain View, CA. Photo: Chris Cameron

Structured Data

If 2009 was the year of "open data" (when previously offline data is uploaded to the Web), then 2010 so far has been the year of RDFa. RDFa is a lightweight way to add extra meaning to HTML web pages. Facebook is using it in their Open Graph platform, which was announced in April. The stated goal of the Open Graph protocol is to enable publishers to "integrate [their] Web pages into the social graph."

Others that have climbed on board the structured data train include Google and retailers like Best Buy and Tesco. Twitter hasn't yet supported RDFa, but its Twitter Annotations project comes close.

The open data movement also continues to expand. In January, Data.gov.uk, a new web site dedicated to making non-personal data held by the U.K. government available for software developers, launched with the help of Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

You can see that 2010 has been very active with innovation! The iPad, new mobile devices, the increasing market penetration of Facebook and Twitter, the rise of the Semantic Web - it's been a fascinating year so far! In the comments, let us know your personal highlight of 2010 so far.

Lead image: Steve Rhodes

At the recent Semantic Technology conference, I sat down with Evri CEO Will Hunsinger. He called Evri the "topical equivalent of a Facebook stream."

In a nutshell, Evri allows you to explore and track topics. Its homepage displays a current hot topic (at time of writing, it was Lance Armstrong and the Tour de France), with other trending topics offered in the menu (for example 'Gulf Oil Spill' is a featured trend and 'LeBron James' is listed as "Trending in US & World'). You may also enter your own topic into the search bar. Evri is like a mix between Google Trends and Google News, with liberal sprinklings of Twitter and Facebook.

Whither Twine...

Evri made the news earlier this year when it acquired failed semantic web bookmarking application, Twine. Curiously, Hunsinger described Evri as "the inverse of Twine" - because Evri does all the work, rather than the user. Twine is an application that relies on its users to actively bookmark pages, a la the much more successful Delicious. Evri automatically collates topical information and presents it the user.

Update: Twine founder Nova Spivack wrote in and stated: "Twine was in fact highly automated as well, but in a different way than Evri - Twine used NLP [Natural language processing] to auto-tag every entry, generate summaries, and used graph algorithms to make recommendations."

Where Evri shares similarities with Twine is in the ability for users to track a topic. Hunsinger said that Evri users may "follow a story as it evolves over time, and tune it." He described this as being like a "mini blog" for its users.

Twine appears to have been of most use to Evri for its underlying technology. Hunsinger told us that Evri is using technology it acquired from Twine to extend Evri's categories and for advanced filtering.

What's Next

Evri is not short on ideas and innovation - for example it announced a Sentiment API last August. However some of these ideas are slow to eventuate. Hunsinger said that the Sentiment API is not in commercial deployment yet, because it requires much more media in order to calculate sentiment and it tends to work best with well-known people (like Barack Obama). However, Evri is working on incorporating data about shares, tweets, and more in order to beef up its Sentiment analysis engine.

The company is also currently working on what Hunsinger described as "Pandora-like recommendations," referring to the geographically-limited online music service Pandora.

Other expansion plans include launching one new channel per week, to extend Evri's topical coverage.

Can Evri Compete as a Consumer App?

Evri is an interesting product and is currently being used by media partners like Hearst and Canwest.

However, Evri will likely continue to struggle as a consumer offering. It's competing against a plethora of real-time news apps - everything from TweetDeck, Google News, Topix, Techmeme, and more. I wouldn't be surprised if Evri is eventually acquired by a big media company for its technology, much as Evri snapped up the struggling Twine for the same reason.

There is perhaps no better example than Facebook's use of RDFa. We chatted to Facebook open standards evangelist David Recordon to find out more.

The Open Graph in a Nutshell

The Open Graph is a wide-ranging platform which includes features such as 'Like' buttons and publisher plug-ins. It also includes a simple, RDF-based markup. This requires publishers to include at least 4 metadata properties in each object: title, type, image, URL. There are a few additional properties which may be optionally added, such as site_name and description.

When the Open Graph was announced, ReadWriteWeb feature writer Alex Iskold wrote a comprehensive guide to the Open Graph for publishers, users and competitors. Here's how he described the markup:

"...the markup enables publishers to say what object is on the page - a movie, a book, a recording artist, an event, a sports team, etc. This automatically enables semantics, that is, an understanding that the user is not just interacting with a web page, but that he or she is liking a specific kind of thing. Semantics then leads to bucketing of the objects into categories like books, movies, music, etc., and gives rise to all sort of applications, including personalized recommendations. Perhaps even more importantly, the markup helps Facebook connect the users across common interests across different web sites."

The syntax that Facebook uses is fairly similar to RDFa, without being an exact match. Sandro Hawke from the W3C (the Web's official standards body), told ReadWriteWeb last week that Facebook is using RDFa "in an abbreviated, not really good modeling way."

Facebook's KISS (Keep it Simple Semantics)

The reason that Facebook is using an abbreviated version of RDFa is that they want to make it as simple as possible for publishers to deploy it. And the W3C is fine with this, because it has a rules standard called RIF that can convert Open Graph code into proper RDFa if needed. Also the W3C and Semantic Web community seem to be having fruitful discussions with Facebook.

We asked Facebook open standards evangelist David Recordon why the company chose not to use exact RDFa syntax. He replied that simplicity was paramount, so they wanted to use as few properties as possible.

However, Recordon said that Facebook's code will actually help the adoption of RDFa. He thinks that RDFa will become a more interesting technology when more people are consuming it (via Facebook's variation of RDFa).

Facebook did not set out to support the Semantic Web, added Recordon, it just wanted simple code that was as close as possible to open standards. He told us that Facebook found the "sweet spot" between the complexity of existing Semantic Web standards and the simplicity required for tens of thousands of developers to place 'objects' inside their web pages.

Open Graph Issues

Facebook's Open Graph protocol has its issues, which Alex Iskold outlined in a follow-up analysis in May (it should be noted that Iskold's startup, GetGlue, has been mining web page metadata for a while now - so it's partly competitive with Facebook, although it also provides support for the Open Graph). Some of Facebook's issues were due to poor implementation of the markup by Facebook partners, but Recordon told us that much of this has been fixed now.

Perhaps a bigger problem is that currently only one object can be specified per web page, which prevents multiple topics or people on a single web page from being semantically marked up. Also, Iskold pointed out that there is no way to disambiguate objects - so if two objects have the same name, they are considered the same thing by Facebook. For example, 'Paris' could refer to the city in France or the city in the USA (also it could be the name of an infamous socialite).

Kick Starting the Semantic Web

These issues ideally should be ironed out, but for now it's clear that Facebook wants Open Graph to be very simple so that as many publishers as possible implement it. That's a sensible business decision, although it means that we're only getting a limited version of the Semantic Web for now. However, the support of Semantic technologies by big companies like Facebook, Google and Best Buy will be enough to kick start this new era of a smarter and more structured Web of data.

What do you think, is Facebook doing enough to support Semantic Web standards? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

This is not just an academic exercise for Best Buy. As we will see, semantic technology has already led to increased traffic and better service to its customers. We spoke to Jay Myers, Lead Web Development Engineer at BestBuy.com, to find out how.

1. It's All Semantics: Open Data, Linked Data & The Semantic Web
2. The State of Linked Data in 2010
3. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009
4. ReadWriteWeb Interview With Tim Berners-Lee
5. Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies

Myers told us that the primary goal of using semantic technologies was to increase the visibility of its products and services. And with data such as store name, address, store hours and GEO data being marked up using RDFa, search engines are now able to identify each of those data components more easily and put them into context.

A quick refresher on the terminology: just as the lingua franca of the Web is HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), RDF (Resource Description Framework) is commonly thought of as the primary language of the Semantic Web. RDFa is a kind of 'lite' version of RDF, which adds metadata to HTML (or XHTML) webpages.

The process of adding RDFa to Best Buy's webpages began two years ago, when the company began to look for ways to get more visibility to its stores on the Web. "At that time," said Myers, "it was difficult for users to find basic store information like store location and hours."

To solve this dilemma, Best Buy gave each store its own blog.

Best Buy employees entered information into the blogs every day, using online forms that output RDFa. Myers told us that the use of RDFa makes "human input from our store employees more visible on the Web."

Best Buy is using Good Relations, a Semantic Web vocabulary for e-commerce that describes product, price, and company data.

Myers remarked that "there isn't a noticeable difference" to the users of Best Buy's website, however all of the RDFa data is very visible to humans via search engine results and its store locator tool. The RDFa data is "also great for machines," said Myers, which has resulted in "a definite up tick in the amount of search traffic to these pages." At last week's SemTech conference, Myers said that it had resulted in a 30% increase in search traffic. He noted that Best Buy hadn't expected to see an SEO benefit, but it's been a boon to them since the company is "very reliant on search engines" for product discovery and store locations.

With Jay Myers at the development wheel, Best Buy's web presence will continue to be enhanced by the Semantic Web. RDFa can ultimately create rich relationships between products, which will in turn "create a deeper visibility to additional products" when a customer is shopping.

That seems like a distinct competitive advantage for Best Buy.

The main takeaway from the conversation was the rapid adoption of RDFa, by big commercial companies such as Facebook and Best Buy. It's come as a "very pleasant surprise" to Ivan Herman.

RDFa is a simpler version of the primary language of the Semantic Web: RDF (Resource Description Framework). RDF is a complex and production-heavy language, so it has struggled to gain adoption over the past decade. The main purpose of RDFa is to add metadata to existing HTML or XHTML webpages, so it is easier to deploy than RDF.

I opened by saying that at last year's SemTech event, adoption of Open Data was the big theme. This year, adoption of RDFa seemed to attract the most chatter in the hallways.

Ivan Herman agreed, saying that it was a "very pleasant surprise [that] there is a buzz around RDFa." Herman remarked that "RDFa is suddenly picking up and it may become the single biggest source of RDF data, aside from relational databases." He added that RDFa is "easy to add and when you see Facebook or others adding RDFa data it's really exciting."

How Facebook is Using RDFa

Indeed, Facebook's adoption of RDFa is exciting. However it should be noted that Facebook is not using pure RDFa; and this is where a new standard called RIF comes in.

At SemTech, W3C announced RIF: Rule Interchange Format. According to Ivan Herman, it is "two standards in one." Firstly, it's a format for exchanging rules between one rules system and another. For example a set of email spam rules that can be exported for another person to use. Secondly, RIF defines a rule language for semantic web data - similar to what can be done with ontologies. Herman said that it enables "simpler things than major ontologies."

Simplicity is a key attribute in the adoption of RDFa. It's also something that Facebook emphasizes (which we will explore more in a follow-up post based on interviews with Facebook people).

According to Sandro Hawke from W3C, Facebook's Open Graph platform uses RDFa "in an abbreviated, not really good modeling way." He said it's because "they [Facebook] need to make it simple enough that everyone can use it." He thinks though that Facebook made the right choice. Hawke explained that RIF "is a way to bridge from that [Open Graph markup] to the more standard modeling that we see in the rest of the Semantic Web."

Hawke sees Facebook's Open Graph as "the real killer app for RIF right now."

Others Adopting RDFa

Another example of RDFa adoption is Best Buy adding RDFa to their entire product catalog, which has resulted in benefits in SEO and cost savings. We will write more about this in a follow-up post.

UK retailer Tesco is doing the same as Best Buy. Drupal 7 is also adding significant support for RDFa. It's the next version of Drupal, a publishing system used by websites like the White House and World Heath Organization. So if you're the manager of a site that runs on Drupal 7, you won't have to do anything - data will automatically be in RDFa format. Other adopters of RDFa include the Library of Congress and eGovernment.

W3C started a new RDFa working group at the end of January, to make a 1.1 version of RDFa. The main goal is to simplify the job of authoring RDFa within HTML. Also, an API for RDFa will be defined.

So overall, the W3C is very pleased with RDFa adoption - although Herman added with smile that "we are never pleased enough."

Image credit: Semantic Web Rubik's Cube, dullhunk

Rich snippets was announced in May last year and began to be seen in results around October. At the SemTech panel today, Google's Pravir Gupta noted that rich snippets impressions have grown four-fold globally since October 2009, with a two-fold increase on the US/English Web. Rich snippets is available in more than 40 languages.

Gupta told the SemTech audience that there are now more than 50 reviews sites using rich snippets, for example sites that offer restaurant reviews. Also there has been uptake on social networking sites, like Facebook and LinkedIn.

The most common use cases are events (which was added in January) and recipe formats. Google is adding support for more formats, such as video, local businesses and shopping.

Google is using structured data open standards such as microformats and RDFa to power the rich snippets feature. As the below chart shows, microformats is more common than RDFa for this feature.

Google spent a good deal of today's panel continuing its drive to get webmasters to adopt rich snippets. It has a tool called the Rich Snippets Testing Tool, which helps publishers utilize rich snippets.

Finally, Kavi Goel from Google talked about how Google can accelerate growth of the ecosystem, noting that less than 5% of webpages currently have semantic markup. Google wants to see this rise to 50% or more. It is looking for critical mass, which includes adding more formats and encouraging more "beneficial peer pressure" for companies to support rich snippets. Goel cited restaurant review sites as an example - it's not just Yelp which supports it, but other restaurant review services too.

Rich snippets is an example of how the Semantic Web is being adopted by large and powerful Internet companies, so it's encouraging to see that Google is pushing for rapid adoption.

So in many ways this is reducing Web publishing to its most basic form, devoid of new content. Is this "automated content manufacturing," as founder Paul Sweeney described it to me today, useful to people?

The use cases of Primal, according to Sweeney, include a teacher building a website of course materials for their students and a small business providing information to support their product.

In my initial tests today, Primal seemed a little raw - although the UI is slick. The brainstorming and 'find content' aspects of the product are essentially search features that surface keywords and media from sites like Wikipedia and Flickr.

What's most interesting about Primal is the publishing aspect, the webpage builder. This is well designed and easy to use. Within a matter of minutes I was able to 'author' a webpage about my favorite band, The Velvet Underground.

However, as noted above, it had no original content on it - which means it doesn't add much value to the Web as a whole.

Primal appears to be competing with other lightweight publishing services, such as Tumblr and Posterous. More so, the so-called Geocities 2.0 startups like Weebly and Yola. The difference is that Primal is much more automated than any of those services, which takes a lot of creativity out of publishing.

I asked Sweeney how he thought Primal compared to Demand Media, the content farm that is pumping thousands of pieces of content onto the Web each day. He acknowledged that Primal will also pump a lot of (unoriginal) new pages onto the Web, but he said that Primal content is architected by the end user and not the company.

Despite the rather hyperbolic terminology in the company's press release (an upcoming product called 'Primal Thought Networking' apparently "supercharges your thinking by remembering, organizing and connecting your ideas in your own machine-readable thought network"), the product itself is interesting because it takes Web publishing down to its very basic bare bones. Whether this is something that enough consumers need or want - and whether it's good for the Web - is yet to be determined.

Data from Google Trends suggests that the term 'web 2.0' became popular in 2005 and peaked in mid-2007 (as measured by how many times the term was entered as a search term in Google). Towards the end of 2008 'social media' started to get popular and then rose steeply in 2009.

If the above chart is to be believed, social media overtook web 2.0 in popularity at the end of 2009. I'm inclined to trust this data, as it matches other data sources we have reported on in ReadWriteWeb over the past couple of years - for example a Nielsen Online report from March 2009 stating that people spent more time in 2008 using social media than on personal email.

The 'news references' chart (the secondary chart below the main one) is also interesting. It shows that over 2009 news media organizations used the term 'social media' far more than 'web 2.0.' Partly that's because 'web 2.0' has always been an awkward term for anyone outside the tech world to understand ("You mean there were two Webs?"). But it undeniably also shows that the term 'social media' began to be bandied about in news media a lot in 2009. And not coincidentally, that's when Facebook and Twitter became very popular in the mainstream.

Nowadays, it's hard to walk anywhere in a metropolitan center without seeing the logos of both Facebook and Twitter. Last week I was in New York and snapped a photo of a local eatery promoting its Twitter account at the counter.

OK, this was New York. But I am seeing both Facebook and Twitter being increasingly used by a wide variety of businesses - online, on TV and in the real world.

The rise of social media is impacting many industries, including news media itself. Kistner points to a Hitwise study which showed that Facebook is sending more traffic to news sites than Google. This isn't necessarily true for all news sites (Google is still ReadWriteWeb's biggest traffic source, for instance), but Facebook and Twitter have become significant drivers of traffic for most news organizations.

I'm inclined to agree with Kistner that there is at least another year or two of growth in social media adoption, so 2012 sounds like a good bet for social media to peak.

What do you think, will 2012 be the peak for social media? Or will the Social Media Era last for even longer than the Web 2.0 one?