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Our 6th daily Comments Competition winner comes from a comment on our post 11 Things To Know About Semantic Web. It came from Alan Wilensky, who wrote that "all of the [Semantic Web] tech that has been so promised is great for diddling, but we haven'st seen productivity delivered." Congratulations Alan, you've won a $30 Amazon voucher, courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Amazon WishList Widget.

1. You don’t need to apologize for calling it Web 3.0. Of course the Web does not upgrade in one go like a company switching to Vista. But there is a definite phase transition from current technologies. My personal Web 3.0 definition is “the combination of Web 2.0 mass collaboration with structured databases”.

ManagedQ is a new search search that provides a visual interface to Google's results (see our full review on AltSearchEngines here). Since ManagedQ's results come directly from Google, there's no loss in result quality, but the service adds a semantic layer to search, by automatically determining the key Person, Places, and Things for your search.

Semantic web browser extension BlueOrganizer relaunched tonight with more of the most popular services on the web smartly integrated into an easier to use interface.

The company says its extension is intended to let users browse the web with context and that its semantic technology cuts steps out of search. The basic idea behind AdaptiveBlue's BlueOrganizer is that it can tell what the web pages you're looking at are about and it offers you useful links based on the particular subject matter.

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.

As Richard MacManus recently predicted, in 2008 we'll witness the rise of semantic web services. From the native support for Microformats in Firefox 3, to the New York Times' utilization of rich headers metadata, to this week's release of the Social Graph API by Google, semantics are starting to slip onto the web. The impact is being felt because large companies are really starting to focus on structured information.

In the same vein, last week Reuters - an international business and financial news giant - launched an API called Open Calais.

We have written a lot here about the the vision of building a structured layer on top of the current web. Annotating billions of HTML documents in a bottom-up way or building top-down tools that can automagically interpret the existing information are the two approaches that we discussed. Together these approaches would result in a global database which will make the web even more connected. The ability to correlate content and concepts accross web sites would reduce the time necessary for searching and would enable the discovery of related information.

One of the projects I've been most intrigued with here at DEMO is Acesis, a clinical data capture service that does two things of interest to me: it makes structured data collection simple and it brings Adobe's Rich Internet Application platforms Flex and AIR into the enterprise.

Medicine is a space with a whole lot of data and a whole lot of money and while I won't claim enough domain expertise to judge the merits of this company relative to other ventures in medical information - I do think they are doing some things that anyone in tech could find interesting.

Russian search engine Quintura (one of our sponsors) has released a private beta of a custom search service for blogs or websites. It's similar to the Eurekster swicki we use on ReadWriteWeb. The defining feature of Quintura's service is a tag cloud that moves fluidly when you click it - see it in action on our network blog AltSearchEngines.

If you'd like to check out Quintura's private beta, click here. Read on for some background on the semantic technology powering Quintura...

Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb, the first full working week of 2008!

Highlights this week: Our coverage of CES, including Web product and strategy announcements from Microsoft and Yahoo!; Google and Facebook join DataPortability Workgroup; a review of the latest Web adventure for television show Lost; an analysis of the 'killer apps' for the Semantic Web; some new, stunning, stats from the world of podcasting; Newsgator releases its premium products for free; and predictions for next week's Macworld conference.