ReadWriteWeb

TechCrunch and Search Engine Land are reporting this morning that Yahoo! will now be indexing Semantic Web and Microformats markup from around the web and will use that information to display more structured search results. Here is the Yahoo! post about the news.

We asked last month how vulnerable Google is in search and the leveraging of standards-based structured data may be the most obvious approach to improving on the search industry's current best practices. As Tim Berners-Lee said just weeks ago the time for the semantic web is now.

Today Marshall Kirkpatrick interviewed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW, with the main topic of discussion being Data Portability. Later in the day at the festival, a star studded panel discussed building portable social networks. The panel highlighted four technologies that help make identity and data more portable across social networks: hCard; XFN and FOAF; OpenID; OAuth.

As Richard MacManus recently predicted, in 2008 we'll witness the rise of semantic web services. From the native support for Microformats in Firefox 3, to the New York Times' utilization of rich headers metadata, to this week's release of the Social Graph API by Google, semantics are starting to slip onto the web. The impact is being felt because large companies are really starting to focus on structured information.

In the same vein, last week Reuters - an international business and financial news giant - launched an API called Open Calais.

We have written a lot here about the the vision of building a structured layer on top of the current web. Annotating billions of HTML documents in a bottom-up way or building top-down tools that can automagically interpret the existing information are the two approaches that we discussed. Together these approaches would result in a global database which will make the web even more connected. The ability to correlate content and concepts accross web sites would reduce the time necessary for searching and would enable the discovery of related information.