ReadWriteWeb

It's time for our weekly summary of Web Technology news, products and trends. On the trends side, we pondered the future of YouTube, analyzed mobile messaging trends, looked into a new search innovation from Google, and more. On the product side, we checked in - one year later - with 10 Semantic Apps we are tracking, celebrated the 1 billionth Mozilla addon, reported on a new Open-Source Media Center, and more. We also have highlights from the Enterprise Channel and Jobwire, our brand new product that tracks hires in tech and new media.

In November 2007, we listed 10 Semantic apps to watch and yesterday we published an update on what each had achieved over the past year. All of them are still alive and well - a couple are thriving, some are experimenting and a few are still finding their way.

Now we're going to list 10 more Semantic apps to watch. These are all apps that have gotten onto our radar over 2008. We've reviewed all but one of them, so click through to the individual reviews for more detail. It should go without saying, but this is by no means an exhaustive list - so if we haven't mentioned your favorite, please add it in the comments.

In November 2007, we listed and reviewed 10 promising Semantic Web apps. A lot can happen in one year on the Internet, so we thought we'd check back in with each of the 10 products and see how they're progressing. What's changed over the past year and what are these companies working on now? The products are, in no particular order: Freebase, Powerset, Twine, AdaptiveBlue, Hakia, Talis, TrueKnowledge, TripIt, Calais (was ClearForest), Spock.

In our next post in this series, we're going to publish a completely new list of Semantic apps to watch! That's right, 10 more Semantic apps. Let us know your suggestions in the comments.

Do you like to know what sort of music, movies, books, and other things your friends like? If so, you have a couple of options for following your friends' interests on the web today. You can either join a social network dedicated to sharing this information (think Goodreads, Flixster, Last.fm) or you can follow your friends on lifestreaming service like FriendFeed where you might happen upon a shared interest somewhere in their stream of updates. A third option would be to only see your friends' interests in context when you were actively viewing a book, movie, album, etc. on the web.

Semantinet today announced the launch of its first product, headup.com. Headup is a browser extension that cross-references data from all your social networks, including Twitter, Gmail, Facebook, Last.fm, Digg, and FriendFeed. Headup integrates directly into these sites and allows you to quickly get more information about your friends' activities on other networks. The extension only works in Firefox and is based on Silverlight 2, which Microsoft just released this week.

Semantinet provided us with 400 invites for our readers. You can find more details about how to claim yours at the end of this post.

Project10X has just published a "Web 3.0 Manifesto". It's a kind of sequel to their Semantic Wave 2008 report released in January this year. Mills Davis, Managing Director of Project10X, told us via email that the new manifesto "reveals how semantic technologies will drive product and service opportunities in the next stage of the internet."

You can download the Executive Summary here. We got a look at the whole report and it is packed full of great data, including the two top 10 lists of Semantic Web opportunities detailed below.

Also in this post we're giving away 3 free tickets to Defrag for the best suggestions in the comments for 'web 3.0' apps. See below for more details.

We have met our share of secretive startups over the years, but few have been as secretive about their plans as Siri, which was founded in December 2007 and did not even have an official name until today. Siri was spun out of SRI International and its core technology is based on the highly ambitious CALO artificial intelligence project. Today, Siri announced that it has raised an $8.5 million Series A financing round, led by Menlo Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures.

RDF is the cornerstone of The Semantic Web, yet there still very few commercial RDF apps.

In the latest issue of Nodalities, a magazine about the Semantic Web by UK company Talis, there is an article by Talis CTO Ian Davis about the state of Semantic Web applications. Davis says that we're still in "Generation Zero" of the Semantic Web, because there are relatively few compelling apps. Specifically he notes that "there are still only a handful of applications that incorporate RDF at their heart and none of these are using the full potential of the Semantic Web." RDF is the Semantic Web's equivalent of the Web's HTML - its chief characteristic is the ability to ascribe meaning to data.

While it has great potential, the Semantic Web has failed to live up to its promises so far. Part of the problem, as Thomson Reuters sees it, is that developers will not add a lot of semantic features to their products until publishers start publishing more semantic data. Reuters' OpenCalais represents one way around this problem. But starting today, Reuters' newest project SemanticProxy will give developers an easier way to extract semantic data from any web site.

When you hear the word "semantic" you likely think of the semantic web - the supposed next iteration of the World Wide Web that features structured data and specific protocols that aim to bring about an "intelligent" web. But the concept of semantics doesn't necessarily apply just to the web - it can apply to other things as well, like your desktop...or even your Excel spreadsheets, according to Ian Goldsmid, founder of Semantic Business Intelligence, whose new app, SDS, brings a semantic system to spreadsheets.

Zemanta is a an interesting European startup that is applying semantic technologies to blogging. Sarah Perez covered the company's launch in March. One can think of Zemanta as an auto-complete function for blogging. As you are typing up a new post, Zemanta's browser plugin fetches related content - images, articles, videos, links - and provides a simple and friendly UI for inserting the related content into your blog. We caught up with Andraz Tori, CTO and co-founder of Zemanta, at the SemTech conference at San Jose last week for an interview.

Today SezWho a universal profile, content discovery, and a sophisticated reputation engine provider, has announced its acquisition of Tejit, a provider of semantic intelligence solutions. The acquisition enables SezWho to provide more precise contextual reputation scores for contributors based on topics of conversation. ReadWriteWeb gives you an in-depth look into SezWho's latest acquisition and how SezWho measures up to the competition.

Tony Sukiennik believes the power of the people trumps the power of the algorithm when it comes to the development of semantic technology. His company, infoGenome, a startup that has been in stealth mode for about four and half years, wants to harness that power by making semantics easy via its innovative drag-and-drop functionality. The i360 software he's developed is essentially the "Mahalo of semantic apps," relying on human knowledge to add meaningful layers of metadata to the information we work with every day. With i360, you can add semantics to everything.

Alright, "semantify" may not be an actual word, but you can probably guess at its meaning: "add a semantic layer to." In this case, we're looking at a small plugin called Triplify that reveals the semantic structures of web applications by converting their database content into semantic formats.

The Economist published a short article about the Semantic Web today, picking up on apps we've covered here many times - like Reuters Open Calais, Twine, Hakia and AdaptiveBlue. But one app right at the end caught my eye, as I'd not heard of it before: Qitera. Its homepage describes it as "a next-generation information engine - a semantic web service that connects everything you know to everything you read." The company is German, but based in San Francisco. Qitera is currently in private beta, so it's hard to know what this app does. But it sounds a lot like Twine.