ReadWriteWeb

Google announced today that it has begun indexing attribution of content to particular authors, not just to the websites they appear on. Links associated with the author of a page can now have the code rel="author" added to them and Google will understand that to mean that the linked name is the linking page's author. That's a potentially significant change to the balance of power between sites and the individuals that create for them.

For example, if you're on ReadWriteWeb right now you can see my name (Marshall Kirkpatrick) linked-to with rel="author" in the HTML. This will enable Google to show an author's own content independently in search results and the company says it is working to determine what all this means for page authority in search results. Google worked with a handful of big publishers to institute this admittedly small technical change and the markup is now automatically included in all content published on Blogger and Youtube.

Facebook now publishes its millions of user generated event listings according to the standardized microformats hCalendar and hCard, according to an announcement today by microformats community leader Tantek Çelik. That means that the venues where all these events are being held are now described in a universally standardized way.

If Facebook were to take one more step and allow websites other than the big 3 search engines to index its events listings, then that could tip the scales and move everyone in the industry to understand places around the world in the same simple terms. Joe's Diner in Denver could be understood to be the same place across Facebook, Foursquare and a world of other location-aware applications if only one giant player in location listings had high-quality Place database marked up in the hCard microformat and publicly accessible. Is Facebook going to do that? Probably not.

Bees can see ultraviolet light that the human eye cannot see. Snakes and mosquitoes can see infrared light. The Firefox (browser) can see things that the human eye can't, too, but a lot of it doesn't get used for anything. So far.

Microformats are one thing that the browser notices while serving up web pages. This type of markup designating certain types of information has just begun to be leveraged in real use cases. Alex Faaborg, Principle Designer on the Firefox team, has some interesting ideas about how the browser could leverage the microformatted information it comes across.

When you want to know about a domain name, you jump to whois to get all of the information on the person who registered it. But when you want to know more about the person who just started following you on Twitter or FriendFeed, it hasn't been that easy - even though we've tried to provide you with tools to do it. Now, a new service promises to simplify the process. It's a new take on whois for the social web: SocialWhois, a service that uses XFN, microformats, APML, and tagging to provide a more complete picture of that new follower's presence online.

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.