ReadWriteWeb

At the Semantic Technology conference in San Francisco today, Google gave an update of its rich snippets initiative - which adds extra information to Google search results. For example, showing restaurant review ratings. It's an experimental Semantic Web feature, but today's update shows that usage is increasing and Google wants to ramp it up significantly.

Rich snippets was announced in May last year and began to be seen in results around October. At the SemTech panel today, Google's Pravir Gupta noted that rich snippets impressions have grown four-fold globally since October 2009, with a two-fold increase on the US/English Web. Rich snippets is available in more than 40 languages.

Tomorrow at the 2010 Semantic Technology Conference, Primal will launch a new publishing platform. It's grandly described as a "semantic synthesis platform," but simply put it's a publishing platform that automates the production of content. What's more, the resulting web pages include no original content. It's all aggregated from other sources.

So in many ways this is reducing Web publishing to its most basic form, devoid of new content. Is this "automated content manufacturing," as founder Paul Sweeney described it to me today, useful to people?

This month, the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project released a study on the semantic Web. The Web will get smarter. It will become more useful. But will the "semantic Web" become the reality that many envision?

Lee Rainie of Pew and Janna Quitney Anderson of Elon University's Imagining the Internet project asked 895 experts to "predict the likely progress toward achieving the goals of the semantic web by the year 2020."

Last month Facebook announced a new standardized way to mark up web pages concerning things like books, movies, music and more. It was called the Open Graph Protocol and was ostensibly intended to make the web comprehensible to computers building a profile of your interests across many different websites.

Unfortunately, it wasn't implemented very well, according to GetGlue CEO Alex Iskold. Iskold, a long-time contributor to this site, penned the most extensive guide to understanding Facebook's Open Graph and a critique of how it was constructed, implemented by launch partners and by Facebook itself. Yelp, IMDB and Pandora for example were all launch partners but have implemented the system incompletely or not at all, even several weeks after launch. Now Iskold has taken his own company's competing semantic markup of pages around the web and used it to build a replacement for a large part of the Facebook code in the wild - using Facebook's own format. Developers interested in understanding the content across 300 major websites, in Facebook's own terms, can now find a robust source of data at GetGlue.

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.

Facebook just shook the tech world by announcing several major initiatives that collectively constitute an aggressive move to weave the social net on top of the existing Web.The rumors were that the leading social network would launch a "Like" button for the entire Web. Instead, Zuckerberg & Co. unveiled a bold and visionary new platform that cannot be ignored.

The bits of this platform bring together the visions of a social, personalized and semantic Web that have been discussed since del.icio.us pioneered Web 2.0 back in 2004. Facebook's vision is both minimalistic and encompassing - but its ambition is to kill off its competition and use 500 million users to take over entire Web.

The semantic web is one of the leading trends we track here at ReadWriteWeb, so it was big news to us earlier this month when Evri announced it was acquiring Twine creators Radar Networks. Following the announcement, Twine CEO Nova Spivack wrote an inspiring and lengthy farewell blog post detailing the acquisition, and the story behind the development and growth of Twine. Towards the end of the post, Spivack outlined some lessons for budding entrepreneurs based on what he learned through his startup experience.

Yesterday we summarized some of the main developments in the Linked Data world over the past year. Linked Data is a W3C-backed movement that is all about connecting data sets across the Web. It can be viewed as a subset of the wider Semantic Web movement, which is about adding meaning to the Web. However, there is some confusion in the Semantic Web community about the crossover. To add to the confusion, there is a term called 'Open Data' that is being bandied around too. This commonly describes data that has been uploaded to the Web and is accessible to all, but isn't necessarily "linked" to other data sets.

So what's the beef with all of these terms? In this post we seek clarity!

In May last year we wrote about the state of Linked Data, an official W3C project that aims to connect separate data sets on the Web. Linked Data is a subset of the wider Semantic Web movement, in which data on the Web is encoded with meaning using technologies such as RDF and OWL. The ultimate vision is that the Web will become much more structured, which opens up many possibilities for "smarter" Web applications.

At this stage last year, we noted that Linked Data was ramping up fast - evidenced by the increasing number of data sets on the Web as at March 2009. Fast forward a year and the Linked Data "cloud" has continued to expand. In this post we look at some of the developments in Linked Data over the past year.

One of the first web design books I bought was Creating Killer Web Sites, a 90s classic by David Siegel. That book was known for pushing visual style over HTML standards. It also encouraged the use of HTML hacks, for example using tables to create layouts. Siegel's techniques were basically workarounds, but they just worked in an era when building web pages was painful due to browser incompatibilities.

In Siegel's latest book, Pull, he tackles the Semantic Web. Once again, Siegel plays loosely with existing web standards.