ReadWriteWeb

James Clark, technical lead for the World Wide Web Consortium's XML activity, published a blog post today about the perceived competition between JSON and XML. Twitter and Foursquare both recently dropped support for XML, opting to use JSON exclusively. Clark doesn't see XML going away, but sees it less and less as a Web technology. "I think the Web community has spoken," Clark concludes. "And it's clear that what it wants is HTML5, JavaScript and JSON." Clark cites a few particular reasons why JSON is winning the hearts and minds of web developers.

Just because the new iPhone arrived in stores today doesn't mean the rest of the technology world shut down. In fact, today in San Francisco the 2010 Semantic Technology Conference continued its week-long series of talks and sessions about the semantic Web - the ability to understand and intelligently interpret content from the Web. A fascinating example of how the semantic Web is colliding with the real-time Web is through Twitter and the impending release of annotations - and Ph.D student Joshua Shinavier provided some fascinating semantic scenarios for their use.

Any of Facebook's over 400 million users will immediately recognize some new features on popular Twitter photo-sharing service Twitpic today as users can now tag people in their photos. In a blog post this morning, the two-year-old company announced it had passed the 10 million user mark and that it sees 40 million unique visitors each month. The company says it is releasing its Face Tagging functionality "to show [its] thanks" to the community, but could it bring headaches and worries with it too?

Let's suppose you uploaded some pictures of a trip to New York City to an online account. Do you tag them "New York City," "NYC," "newyork," or all of the above? How do you know your content will be correctly identified and related to other content on the web? And if you come across the tag "Tesla," how do you know whether it refers to the scientist, the car company, or the band?

Common Tag is a new tagging format that creates references to concretely defined concepts with their own metadata and URLs. With Common Tag, site owners can simply topic hubs, cross-promote content, and enrich pages with data, images, and widgets.

A new project called ContextMiner has been created by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The tool lets anyone automate the collection of links to online videos and blogs along with their extensive metadata. Although they're calling ContextMiner a YouTube archiving tool, it doesn't actually download the videos off the site...yet. Instead, it extracts the embed, and the provides that to you along with other details like the number of views and what sites are linking to the video.