ReadWriteWeb

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.

RSS and syndication are the veins that the new social web flows through. Countless products and services have been built on top of RSS in the past few years but there are always a few that stand above the rest.

As part of this year's Top 10 Products series, we offer below the Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008. These are the feed tools we and the people we know use day in and day out - we love them, we hate them, we wouldn't want to work without them.

How many new websites can you fit in a Volkswagen Beetle? Sometimes it feels like that's what we're trying to do these days - but all these new applications and services don't have to be crammed into our heads and lives as separate things to try out and remember.

Many new technologies work best in concert; the functionality of one application can be vastly improved by using it together with another one. Here are some of our favorite examples of apps that work best together, followed by some favorite workflows from friends of ReadWriteWeb. We hope you'll share your favorite combos in comments, too, so we can all learn some new things.

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.

The timing couldn't be better for the release of Semantify, a new service from Israel/San Francisco's Dapper.net. One week after Yahoo! announced that it will begin indexing the semantic markup and meaning of content on the web, Semantify offers a remarkably simple way to get your website marked up semantically. Automatically, forever.

The founders of the data extraction and API creation service Dapper announced this week that their aim is to leverage Dapper in the service of ad networks and derive a semantic index of pages around the web from that activity. They will launch their ad powering product at Ad:Tech in April. Essentially, it will perform ad funded indexing of the semantic web.

Here's how it will work: Dapper lets users identify and tag particular fields on any page. It then extracts the value in that field and makes it available in XML. As a result of this advertising activity, Dapper believes a substantial quantity of pages around the web could have fields of interest delineated and tagged with relevant terms. Relationships between pages and fields and terms and tags can all be extracted and analyzed from this aggregated activity.

Open source wiki vendor MindTouch is releasing a series of major new features Monday and some of them are quite interesting. People used to talk about MindTouch for its outlandish stunts - like working with nutball John Gotts on the short-lived Wiki.com platform and hiring a Bono impersonator to walk the exhibit floor at DEMO. Those days seem like the distant past as now the MindTouch software gets attention on its own.

Wired has an awesome top story today on the world of startups utilizing scraped data from big companies to offer new layers of value for their own users. It's a roughly objective piece that I highly recommend reading but it was also inspiration for me to finally record a screencast on the subject (see below).

I love RSS, probably more than anything on the web. If you're not familiar with the concept, see my very old definition of RSS and my almost-as-old post on teaching people about RSS.

Not every page on the web publishes an RSS feed, though. Thus the need for these wonderful screen scraping tools. I've written about a variety of tools you can use to create a feed for a site or page that doesn't have one. Sometimes, though, you've got to pull out the big guns. In those cases, it's time for Dapper.