ReadWriteWeb

Two weeks ago, Facebook has announced a major new initiative called Facebook Open Graph. This is an attempt to not only re-imagine Facebook, but in a lot of ways, an attempt to re-define how the Web works. We wrote in details about the implications of this move for all interested parties.

A big part of the announcement is Facebook's vision of a consumer Semantic Web. In this new world, publishers have an incentive to annotate pages by marking up activities, events, people, movies, books, music and more. The proper markup, would in turn, lead to a much more interconnected Web - people would be connected with each other across websites and around the things they are interested in.

The book and media industries are going through interesting times, to put it mildly. As physical books prepare for their demise, the confusion around pricing of digital ones grows. Yet, whether physical or digital, to sell books you need marketing. People need to hear about a book before they buy it.

This is where the book review come in. Every publicist and publisher's dream is to land a positive review with an authoritative source. A good review in The New York Times or the L.A. Times used to be a pass to big figure sales. Sounds like it still should be, but it is not, because most book reviews are poorly formatted and cannot be recognized by Google and other software.

Amid the dark days on Wall Street and in global markets, it seems to be up to technology to step up and deliver solid analysis and rational scrutiny. The US market regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), ratified a proposal on Wednesday for public companies and mutual fund companies to file their financial statements in XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language). The XML-based language is also known as "Interactive Data" in financial circles and promises faster analysis with wider coverage. All things being equal, it will mitigate the poor analysis and regulation that's been contributing to stupendously bad financial decisions.