ReadWriteWeb

Yahoo! is going to shutter its social bookmarking service Delicious, the web learned today, and with it will sink an incredibly valuable source of collectively curated knowledge. You can easily export your own bookmarks (no verdict yet where we should all meet up to import them to) but what if you want to export other peoples'? That's at least half the value of the service, socially curated discovery.

Tonight I thought I'd go loot a little from a burning building owned by a company not interested in putting out the fire. Specifically, I went to extract the top 50 links to pages that had been tagged by users with both the words "Twitter" and "International". Where else are you going to find a reading list of the best collected written works and other multimedia about almost any given topic? Unfortunately, automated extraction is blocked by the site and the rickety, antiquated API appears focused on returning you little more than your own bookmarks. If there's a clear way to accomplish export of not just my bookmarks, but all bookmarks with one or more tags, from all users - I haven't been able to find it yet.

Update: 24 hours later, Yahoo! has issued a statement saying they would like to sell, not close, Delicious.

If you've been within shouting distance of me over the last month, you've probably heard me singing the praises of Needlebase, a great new point-and-click tool for extracting, sorting and visualizing data from across pages around the web. I've been using it for all kinds of things and now you can too.

When we first reviewed Needle here on ReadWriteWeb, it was in closed beta and new users had to request an account. Now it's open and available for all: free for personal use or by subscription for commercial use. Check out some examples of ways I've used this exciting new technology below.

"What do you think about Dapper?" That was the question it felt like everyone asked me for weeks after I wrote up a startup called Dapper.net on TechCrunch in the Summer of 2006. "Create an API for any website!" was the company's unofficial slogan. Almost no one understood exactly what could be done with this powerful point-and-click tool, but everyone I talked to knew it was exciting.

Last week the company was acquired by Yahoo and brief press coverage of the deal called Dapper simply a semantic advertising platform. It was so much more than that, especially for me. Dapper set my imagination on fire, it powered acts of community management magic and it helped me meet Neil Young in person. We spent many long nights together. Four years after I first wrote about it, I still bring Dapper up in conversation frequently - but for a while now it's been part of a story of heartbreak and caution.

In the read/write era, enterprise technology has been playing catchup with the consumer sector, integrating social networking, wikis and activities streams into business-grade applications. But that hasn't always been the case - look at the evolution of e-mail, which was originally nurtured by enterprises. And there's at least one area in which enterprises are leading the pack today: point-and-click app creation and the data mashups that feed them.

In this article, we'll analyze the trends and technologies that power the Semantic Web. We'll identify patterns that are beginning to emerge, classify the different trends, and peak into what the future holds.

In a recent interview Tim Berners-Lee pointed out that the infrastructure to power the Semantic Web is already here. ReadWriteWeb's founder, Richard MacManus, even picked it to be the number one trend in 2008. And rightly so. Not only are the bits of infrastructure now in place, but we are also seeing startups and larger corporations working hard to deliver end user value on top of this sophisticated set of technologies.