ReadWriteWeb

Google announced today support for enhanced markup for video search. This will allow webmasters to include important information, such as titles and descriptions, in machine-readable HTML along with the JavaScript or Flash videos themselves.

In a blog post, video search project manager Michael Cohen wrote, "We wanted to offer webmasters an additional tool, so today we're taking a page from the rich snippets playbook and announcing support for Facebook Share and Yahoo! SearchMonkey RDFa."

Semantic search engine Evri can now understand how the web feels with the launch of their new sentiment web API. While busy scouring the net for people, places, and things and determining the relationships between them, the search engine is now able to understand the feelings associated with these entities, too, be them positive or negative. Using the API, developers can build applications for things like market intelligence, market research, sports and entertainment, brand management, product reviews and more.

When we first looked at Faviki, a social bookmarking application which made its debut last year, we were intrigued by their idea of "semantic tagging." What makes Faviki different from its competitors, services like del.icio.us, Diigo, and the now-defunct Ma.gnolia, is the way the service suggests tags to its users. The suggestions don't come from the community of Faviki users and their tagging history - they come from structured info extracted from the Wikipedia database.

Today, Faviki is releasing an upgrade to their service which will give you even better control over the tagging process, making bookmarking even easier than before. They're also announcing support for OpenID.

Today, at the Semantic Technology Conference, Rob Larson and Evan Sandhaus of the New York Times announced together that the Times will soon be publishing its copious index as Linked Data.

The Times' data will join content from Project Gutenberg, a vast online library of text from public domain books, data from the U.S. census, and information from many other formative and vital entities in the semantic web space. Larson and his team intend to make available hundreds of thousands of tags for content dating back to 1851. This will providing give developers an invaluable, automatically navigable roadmap for the publication's vast directory of knowledge and will link that data to existing pages, people, and content around the web.

Semantic technology company TopQuadrant announced today that NASA is using its semantic application platform, the TopBraid Suite, to "model, organize, integrate and exchange data" within the NASA Constellation Program. The goal of the NASA Constellation Program, announced in 2004, is to explore the solar system - starting with a return to the Moon and ultimately aiming to explore Mars and other destinations.

The Web 3.0 Conference in New York last week was a visible success. Attendance was good, and so it seems that the organizers are making money. That is significant in a recession, when many conferences that were announced have had to be suddenly canceled due to lack of interest. At a more qualitative level, the Web 3.0 Conference had a good mix of different types of people. It was not an echo chamber. Personally, I found the conversations more stimulating than average for a conference.