With information from 404 travel sites including Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz, and information on more than 150,000 hotels, Kayak trends offers a great snapshot into the demographics of a destination's most frequent visitors.

Says CTO Paul English, "People have conducted hundreds of millions of travel searches on KAYAK in the past year, generating a tremendous amount of data on travel demand trends. We're happy to make this information available to the travel press and to the general public."

In case a flight is indeed canceled, WorldMate offers a built-in hotel search courtesy of Hotels.com. In addition, the app also offers users the ability to find alternative flights, as well as weather forecasts, a tip calculator, and a currency converter. All of these are available in the free and paid versions of the app.

What makes the app stand out, though, is that you just have to email your travel confirmations from airlines and hotels to WorldMate and the service will automatically translate these documents into an itinerary and display the info in the iPhone app. On iTunes, a number of users complain that WorldMate wasn't able to understand their email confirmations. For me, this worked perfectly, though your mileage may vary.

In this respect, the app is quite similar to TripIt, which also converts confirmation emails into itineraries and displays them on the phone. TripIt's iPhone app, however, does not send out push notifications.

Overall, the app is definitely aimed at the frequent traveler, though it can still be extremely helpful if you are just going away for a short trip. I tested it during a recent weekend trip and it worked like a charm. When my flight was delayed, I promptly received an update and the app also notified me of a gate change long before the gate agent even made the announcement.

If you frequently find yourself wandering down airport concourses, WorldMate is the perfect app to have around. You don't have to constantly update the airline's website or check FlightStats to see if your flight is on time. Instead, WorldMate will just automatically let you know if something is wrong.

WorldMate is also available for the BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Palm OS.

Get WorldMate Pro for Free

WorldMate offered us 15 free pro versions for our readers. Just send an email to rww AT worldmate.com and WorldMate will contact you with more details on how to claim your WorldMate Gold invite.

• Gregg Brockway, President & Co-Founder, TripIt
• Marko Ahtisaari, CEO & Co-Founder, Dopplr
• Hugh Birch, VP of Product Development, Yapta
• Jonah Sigel, VP Business Development, PlanetEye

We welcome your suggestions for discussion points, either in the comments here or by tuning in LIVE to the show - via Calliflower or Facebook - and participating in the chat room.

UPDATE: The podcast is available for download here.

Unfortunately, frequent flyer miles will only provide so much detail. That's why the latest project from Dopplr - the site that helps you keep track of your comings and goings, as well as those of your friends - is so interesting. They're offering to answer a variety of travel history questions by providing Dopplr users with Personal Annual Reports that will help them visualize their travel during 2008.

As the Dopplr team gathers data for each individual, there will likely be some interesting metrics and trends that appear at the macro level, too. We remain hopeful that Dopplr will choose to publish an aggregate view of travels for all users. They've already hinted at one interesting aggregate metric.

Travelers who used Dopplr to record trips in 2008 should expect their reports to arrive by email, this week. In the meantime, the Dopplr team has released a sneak peak of the reports. The subject? What United States President-elect Barack Obama's Dopplr account might look like if he had one:

If you're a frequent traveler who hasn't yet tried Dopplr, perhaps 2009 would be a good year to give it a try. At the very least, you'll have a better picture of where you spent your time this year - even if you don't really want to answer the question of how many miles you logged.

Using content from Flickr, YouTube, and other services as well as user-entered information, TripSay helps travelers create detailed firsthand accounts of their experiences, recommend particular locations to likeminded travelers, suggest must see sites, and warn of potential dangers. Throw in some interesting icons, voting ala Digg and Reddit, and metrics on most visited places, and you've suddenly got a very vibrant community of crowdsourced travel information - with a central dashboard to manage it all.

In short, it's a virtual tour guide, courtesy of the hive mind.

But what about the economy? Given the current economic conditions, you might think that traveling would be low on the priority list. TripSay offers something for both the have-to business traveler and the want-to vacation traveler. And, no matter what shape the economy, budget-conscious travel is always a popular topic.

While TripSay is still in beta, the service spent a substantial amount of time in private testing before opening in the fall of 2008. Meaning? There's a good chunk of content available for perusing.

To try it for yourself, visit TripSay and register for an account. Maybe that next business trip can be a little more interesting - or that next vacation could be more affordable.

This is the seventh in our series of top products of 2008:

1. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
2. Top 10 International Products of 2008
3. Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
4. Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008
5. Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2008
6. Top 10 Enterprise Web Products of 2008

Finance

Mint

Mint single-handedly changed the market for personal finance tools on the Internet in 2008 and forced Quicken, its closest competitor, to start offering its own online tools for free as well. Mint aggregates personal finance data from across the web and displays a consolidated view of all of your accounts in a very well designed and easy to use user interface. Mint also uses this data to recommend better credit cards and savings accounts to its users.

Mint launched its beta program in late 2007 and came out of beta in October 2008.  By October, Mint already had close to half a million users and had managed over $12 billion in transactions. In the course of 2008, Mint added a substantial number of new features to its lineup, including the ability to get an overview of your investment accounts. Mint also launched a major redesign of its user interface in August.

Rudder

While Rudder might look similar to Mint at first, this personal finance tool has a very different focus. While Rudder also aggregates your banking and credit card accounts, it does not focus on analyzing your past spending habits in the way Mint does. Instead, its focuse is on the letting you know how much money you still have to pay your monthly bills. One of the great advantages of Rudder is that it sends all your updates to your inbox, so that you don't even have to log in to the service to keep up to date.

Rudder debuted at this year's DEMOfall conference in San Diego and, given the current economic situation, couldn't have launched at a more opportune time. Rudder also features a large number of useful finance planning tools and a great mobile site.

Health

PatientsLikeMe

PatientsLikeMe is an online community for people with life-changing medical conditions like Multiple Sclerosis, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or Fibromyalgia. Even though the site is still relatively now, it already provides on of the largest patient communities, and also features a wide range of research tools for symptoms and treatments.

PatientsLikeMe was founded in 2004 and defines its mission as providing a platform for sharing real world medical data. Members of the site often share data about their individual health experiences like symptoms, weight, mood swings, or drugs they have taken. Thanks to this, you can easily find others who are in the same situation as you and see what treatments are working for them.

Earlier this year, we named PatiensLikeMe as one of our favorite Web 2.0 health apps.

Sermo

Our second top health app is also a social network, but this time for physicians. Sermo has over 90,000 members who exchange information about both medical and non-medical issues. As Matthew Holt from the Health Care Blog pointed out to us, the site also features some highly sophisticated survey and ratings tools, though it is only open to registered physicians.

This year, Sermo also rolled out a partnership with Bloomberg that provides healthcare investors with access to medical information compiled by the site's members.

Education

TeachStreet

TeachStreet is not an educational site in the traditional sense. Instead, it provides a marketplace for teachers and students to meet. TeachStreet, whose motto is 'Learn New Things,' focuses mostly on teaching adults anything from arts and crafts, to bagpiping and foreign languages. TeachStreet started out in Seattle, WA, but expanded to Portland, OR and the Bay Area this year. The site already lists over 60,000 different classes and instructors.

TeachStreet is an interesting tool, both for teachers to gain more visibility, and for students to find the right classes and teachers. Thanks to its excellent search functions and well-designed layout, TeachStreet has already made a name for itself in the regions where it has officially launched and is poised for more growth in 2009.

After the jump: Politics, Non-Profits, Travel

Politics

OpenCongress

While the U.S. election surely dominated the news this year, one non-election related web app that we really came to appreciate this year was OpenCongress. OpenCongress is a project by the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation and is definitely a must for political junkies. The site tracks all the news and votes in the U.S. Congress through an easy to use interface that features a lot of AJAX and RSS. The site even supports OpenID and also provides its users with a large number of widgets they can implement on their own sites.

As our own Marshall Kirkpatrick pointed out in his review of the site, it makes users "want to pay attention to politics because the user experience is so smooth and compelling."

Non-Profits

Kiva

Kiva is a micro-lending service that was founded in 2005 and at that time, it was the first person-to-person micro-ending site on the net. Kiva allows its users to lend small amounts of money to entrepreneurs in developing nations. The loans typically go towards starting up or expanding small, local businesses, ranging from a motorcycle repair shop in Lebanon to tailors in Pakistan.

In November, Kiva announced that over $50 million have now been lend by Kiva's over 330,000 members. This is a major success for the organization, especially given that Kiva had only loaned $11 million by September 2007. Kiva also ran a successful billboard campaign in California thanks to the help of PayPal.

The current financial crisis is obviously affecting Kiva and the organization is already seeing fewer lenders. Hopefully, this trend will reverse in 2009.

Wild Apricot

Wild Apricot provides software-as-a-service solutions to small and medium sized associations, clubs, and non-profits. It has created tightly integrated solutions for membership management, event registration, and creating customized web sites, with a focus on the non-profit sector. Service plans range from free to a flat fee of $200 a month, depending on the size of the contact database you plan to manage on the service.

In 2008, Wild Apricot rolled out a number of updates to its software, including support for Google Checkout, custom URLs, and better group management. Currently, Wild Apricot has more than 10,000 non-profit organizations as clients. We also like the company's well-written and informative blog about technology for non-profits.

Disclosure: Wild Apricot is a RWW sponsor.

Travel

Yapta

The web clearly revolutionized the travel industry. Booking flights and vacations online has quickly become a routine activity, even for less savvy web users. While Yapta launched in 2006, it was really only in 2008 that the site was able to differentiate itself from larger competitors like Kayak, FareCompare,  or Farecast. In June, Yapta announced a new feature that allows you to track airfare changes, and in November, Yapta unveiled a unique service that also allows you to track when and where you can use you frequent flier miles to book a flight.

While it's probably best to take this data with a grain of salt, Yapta claims to have saved its users over $91 million in airfare since May 2007.

PlanetEye

PlanetEye is a social travel site with a strong focus on providing both user-generated content, as well as stories from local editors all over the world. One of the core features of PlanetEye are its Travel Packs, which let you clip content from the site while you are planning your trip. This allows you to easily create your own personalized travel guides. PlanetEye came out of beta in the middle of 2008 and has already managed to established a loyal community of users on its service. PlanetEye also partnered with Travelocity, OpenTable, and StubHub.

Besides giving you great info for planning your trip, PlanetEye also lets you share geotagged photos with the rest of the PlanetEye community. The highlight of the service, however, is the content added by PlanetEye's local experts which ranges from blog posts to reviews of restaurants and local sights.

That's our list of 'real world' web apps that we think have made a difference to mainstream people in 2008. Let us know in the comments what your favorites are.

And when it comes to keeping track of the techie crowd and their travels, Dopplr is one of the best resources around. Now, they're giving users a view into some of those travel patterns with Dopplr city pages.

Looking at even a few pages reveals some interesting trends. Austin, Texas, USA, for example, gets a heavy influx of Dopplr users in March. Why? The annual pilgrimage to the SXSW interactive festival. Portland, OR, USA, by contrast, shows a definite uptick during the summer months. London, Paris, and Tokyo have steady traffic throughout the year. (Obviously, I could spend hours just thumbing through these cities.)

But there's something else interesting happening here - which Marshall Kirkpatrick mentioned recently. To make the reports a little more aesthetically appealing, the city pages pull in images of the respective cities from Creative Commons licensed content held on Flickr. Not only does it provide more context for the city, it offers yet another venue for Flickr users to showcase their work. All thanks to Creative Commons.

Unfortunately, while the image concept is laudable - and often beautiful - many of the randomly selected photos tend to obscure the graphs of the travel data. So, if you're looking for beautiful images, you're in luck. But if you want to read the data, sometimes you're going to have to strain to see it.

Nonetheless, Dopplr city pages are well worth a visit. It's great to see Dopplr exposing some of the interesting data points that the company has been accumulating about its user base. And I'm a firm believer that any time this sort of data is made accessible, it's always wise to take a cursory look, for my own edification.

To see city pages in action, register or log in to Dopplr and search for the cities that interest you - or try clicking through some of the cities from your trips.

Dopplr mostly courts frequent fliers and business travelers. Currently, it mostly functions as a way for this group to keep track of travel plans and arrange impromptu meetings. Overall, Dopplr's functionality is quite spartan, but thanks to its budding recommendation and review system, the site is slowly adding more proprietary content.

Dopplr was also one of the earliest backers of Yahoo's Fire Eagle location sharing platform, though the site doesn't seem to make heavy use of these features so far. The most interesting development for Dopplr in the last few months was the addtion of groups, which is a very useful feature for companies that have a lot of employees who travel frequently.

At the same time, though, other travel sites and social networks like PlanetEye, TripIt, or TravelMuse could easily replicate Dopplr's feature set while building on their already extensive backlog of original content.

While the focus for many travel sites has been on providing just one service, be it guidebook content, booking, or photo sharing, PlanetEye aims to bring all of this together. The central focus of the service is the so called "Travel Pack," where users can store content they clip from anywhere on the site. That content could be one of the geotagged images that appear on PlanetEye's Microsoft powered maps, an article about a local sight, or a restaurant review.

Even though PlanetEye is still a very young site, it already features a lot of exclusive content. While its hotel and restaurant database pretty much covers every possible destination world-wide, the best content on PlanetEye is written by its Local Experts, though this is only available for some of the most popular destinations like Rome or San Francisco.

Maps

PlanetEye has licensed technology from Microsoft's World-Wide Media eXchange program, which powers its maps. Indeed, PlanetEye's maps are, besides the Travel Pack, one of PlanetEye's most useful features in planning a trip, as they are directly coupled with its database of restaurants, sights, and geotagged images, all of which are dynamically updated as your scroll through the map. One other nice aspect of these maps is that they are always interactive, no matter where they appear on the site.

Mobile

One feature that is still missing from PlanetEye is a mobile interface. PlanetEye features a lot of good travel content that could be very useful during a trip, but its interface doesn't lend itself easily to browsing on a mobile phone. According to PlanetEye, a mobile version will be released this year.

Verdict

A lot of features on PlanetEye are similar to those of other recent start-ups in this space, including Tripwolf, TravelMuse, and NileGuide. None of these services, however, combine all of them together into one package the way PlanetEye does. The only service that comes relatively close to PlanetEye's feature set is TripAdvisor, though PlanetEye puts a lot more emphasis on mapping and its user interface is a lot more fluid and flexible.

Looking at the latest data, Hitwise predicts that Google would either enter the automotive or music market next. Both of these are very broad categories with a large range of competitors already operating in them, but then, that has never stopped Google from entering a new market.

Google Autos

Google could easily build a competitor to cars.com, Vehix, or Autotrader by tying together data from its Google Base product (which already has a 'Vehicles' category) and mashing it up into a more comprehensive used car market by also allowing users (or dealers) to easily put up their own cars for sale. As of now, Google is only aggregating data from all the major online car buying sites.

Google Music

Rumors about Google Music have flared up regularly over the last few years, but so far, no actual product has materialized. Entering the music business is obviously fraught with problems for any new player. Given the issues around licensing music, as well as its failure in selling videos on Google Videos, Google might not want to develop a mainstream music platform.

What Google could do, though, would be to offer a platform for independent musicians, somewhat akin to what MySpace was in its early days or what AmieStreet does today.

Google Travel

Given Google's background in search, we think Google might also be likely to develop a competitor to the large travel aggregator sites like Kayak or FareCompare. Not only is this a market where Google could develop a decent revenue stream outside of its core advertising market, but it would fit in right with Google's core expertise. As of now, Google only links to Kayak, Expedia, Hotwire and others when you enter the right query into its search engine, but it doesn't display any actual results itself yet.

Our Prediction: Travel is Next

If Google is indeed trying to fill out all of these major niches with a product of its own, we think a travel product is still Google's most likely next move. It is not only the closest to Google's core competency of search, but Google could also easily put ads on there as well.

Seattle based travel startup Yapta.com re-launched its homepage today as a full-service air travel search engine. Yapta originally launched in May 2007 as a browser add-on for bookmarking flight information and tracking price developments. The new site has retained this focus, but moved it away from the extension and made all of its core functions available on the homepage as well.

With the airlines cutting back their service in every imaginable way while raising their prices simultaneously, Yapta offers travelers another tool to at least try to save some money on their trips.

With its redesign, Yapta joins a crowded, but lucrative market. In terms of functionality and even design (especially in its color choices), Yapta most closely resembles Kayak and the now Microsoft owned Farecast, though unlike Kayak, it doesn't search for hotels and rental cars, but is completely focused on air travel.

It has all the basic functionality one would expect from a travel search engine. Like its direct competitors, Yapta gathers its information directly from the airlines, but then refers its users to the airlines to finalize the booking. This saves the users those pesky booking fees that sites like Orbitz, Expedia, and Travelocity are prone to charge.

Yapta's focus is still on tracking price changes and especially on alerting its users of price changes after the ticket has already been bought. Airlines will often give travelers a credit or voucher when prices drop significantly - a fact that was unknown to many before Yapta made it convenient to track these changes. All a user has to do is to enter the flight information and confirmation number into Yapta and it will track price changes until the day of the flight.

The Good

Yapta does a good job at combining some of the best features of its competitors in one. Searching for flights and bookmarking them for later is easy and convenient. Also, it seems to be very good at keeping track of any price changes. I created three alerts this morning while testing the site and by noon, it had updated the prices of all of them at least twice (every time, of course, the new price was higher...).

A lot of Yapta's more advanced functions are squarely aimed at frequent travelers. Travelers can, for example, combine various flights into one trip and have them tracked as one.

The Bad

As Yapta is aimed at least in part at frequent travelers, it seems strange that their search functions are still relatively basic. Kayak, with its AJAX interface, makes it easy to quickly display only flights that leave and arrive at certain times, connect through certain airports, have short layovers etc. Yapta's search, on the other hand, doesn't even allow to search for flights to neighboring airports and has no filtering capabilities once the search in completed. One especially glaring oversight is that users can't search for flights by airline alliance. Yapta does allow for searching by preferred airlines, but a search by alliance would be very helpful for those of us who try to maximize our frequent flyer miles.

From a usability perspective, the homepage itself doesn't display any search functionality, but prominently features a sign-up form, even though the search is available through a link at the top of the page. While the site is probably most useful for those users who sign-up, I would assume that Yapta is going to lose quite a few users who just want to try it out without having to go through the (arguably very easy) sign-up process.

Verdict

Yapta's focus on tracking fares makes it a very useful tool for both frequent and infrequent travelers. In many ways, it complements Farecast. Farecast will predict if prices will rise or drop in the future, while Yapta will keep you informed if Farecast got things wrong and prices do drop unexpectedly.

I will definitely make Yapta part of my travel planning routine, but probably more for tracking fares after I bought them than for booking through them directly, as Yapta is still lacking somewhat in flexibility when it comes to its search functions.

Upon login, you're taken to Tripwolf's main page where you can immediately begin a search using the provided search box or you can click on one of the tabs to access other areas of the site like the galleries (photos), travelers, journals, guides, or the soon-to-be added "trips" section.

On the left side are links to your personal info - your personal galleries, your trips, your profile and messages, etc. There's also a handy scrapbook feature on to which you can drag-and-drop places you find on tripwolf when doing travel research. That scapbook can be shared with friends via email, or, with one click, transformed into a PDF that you can download and print out as your own sort of personalized travel guide.

Content Galore!

Tripwolf's investor and content partner is MairDumont, a European provider of travel information who offers a range of printed publications for tourists. MairDumont's involvement with tripwolf allows them to provide content for the site, including destination information and photos. The combination of this high-quality content along with that which is user-gen gives tripwolf a more professional feel while still retaining the fun of a social network. It's also nice because there's a lot of content to explore right away - currently over 200,000 points of interest have been cataloged - so you don't have to wait on a userbase to do all the work for you.

When you come across a destination you want to update with your own info, a wiki-edit feature lets you upload your own photos, add and update places, add facts, reviews, and more.

The Facebook App

Thanks to facebook integration, you can easily find who among your friends is already on the service and invite others to join you. You can also add friends from LinkedIn, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird, Mac address book, orkut, and Xing.

On facebook, you can use the app to search destinations, keep track of your favorite places, and view what your tripwolf friends are up to.

Get In Today

The site goes public on July 1st and, at that time, they will be adding a way for you to book trips. An iPhone application will also soon follow. However, ReadWriteWeb users don't have to wait until July - you can go ahead and join now the private beta now by clicking this link. (Feel free to add me after you do.)

"It's a trap. When you download it runs a validation check to see if you are running a pirated version of photoshop. Which then logs your ip back to Adobe HQ who then mark the ip address in the automated billing system. You will recieve [sic] a fine for $500 in the next 2 to 5 working days. Congratulations" -- luke16

The problem, though, that's not true. The book download is just a PDF file; it doesn't run a version check on Photoshop, it doesn't log your IP address, and SitePoint has no relationship with Adobe. Nonetheless, enough Digg users bought into luke16's active imagination that the story was buried.

"So anyone else in the digg community who might be interested in a full, print-quality Photoshop book -- sorry, you miss out," wrote Tilley. "All because some goose decided to throw around some unsubstantiated claim about the legitimacy of our giveaway. What's worse is that everyone believed him!"

Crowd Rules

SitePoint's experience is an example of herd behavior or groupthink, where the Digg group acted blindly on poor information, without rationally thinking it through. This is a problem with the wisdom of crowds concept: if unchecked, rather than coming to the best conclusion based on the wisdom of the group, a crowd can come to the worst conclusion based on dumbness that spreads from a single bad node.

Last year, we laid out a set of rules to get the most out of a crowd. It might be a good idea to revisit those here:

1. Crowds should operate within constraints. To harness the collective intelligence of crowds, there need to be rules in place to maintain order.
2. Not everything can be democratic. Sometimes a decision needs to be made, and having a core team (or single person) make the ultimate decision can provide the guidance necessary to get things done and prevent crazy ideas and groupthink from wreaking havoc on your product.
3. Crowds must retain their individuality. Encourage your group to disagree, and try not to let any members of the group disproportionately influence the rest.
4. Crowds are better at vetting content than creating it. It is important to note that in most of the above projects, the group merely votes on the final product; they do not actually create it.

Digg's problem lies in the third point -- members were able to quickly spread undue influence on the group via poor information that caused undesired results before that information could be properly vetted by the group for accuracy. Eventually, more reasoned commenters on Digg shot down luke16's paranoid conspiracy theory, but by that time it was too late, the story had already been buried.

Digg probably gets it right far more often than it gets it wrong, but SitePoint's experience is a lesson in the dangers of letting a crowd run wild. Any site that relies on a crowd to organize information should be wary of things like this happening.

In addition to being broadcast to over 100 museum events across the US, NASA is broadcasting the the Phoenix landing on NASA TV and live blogging from mission control. The official mission page has a lot of great information and multimedia about the Phoenix mission, which is expected to touch down on Mars at 19:53:33 ET (just before 8 PM).

Give it a look and let us know what you thought of NASA's web coverage of the latest mission to Mars.

"UpTake matches a traveler with the most useful reviews, photos, etc. for the most relevant hotels and activities through attribute and sentiment analysis of reviews and other text, the analysis is guided by our travel ontology to extract weighted meta-tags," said President Yen Lee, who was co-founder of the CitySearch San Francisco office and a former GM of Travel at Yahoo!

What UpTake isn't, is a booking engine like Expedia, a meta price search engine like Kayak, or a travel community. UpTake is strictly about aggregation of reviews and semantic analysis and doesn't actually do any booking. According to the company only 14% of travel searches start at a booking engine, which indicates that people are generally more interested in doing research about a destination before trying to locate the best prices. Many listings on the site have a "Check Rates" button, however, which gets hotel rates from third party partner sites -- that's actually how UpTake plans to make money.

The way UpTake works is by applying its specially created travel ontology, which contains concepts, relationships between those concepts, and rules about how they fit together, to the 20 million reviews in its database. The ontology allows UpTake to extract meaning from structured or semi-structured data by telling their search engine things like "a pool is a type of hotel amenity and kids like pools." That means hotels with pools score some points when evaluating if a hotel is "kid friendly." The ontology also knows, though, that a nude pool might be inappropriate for kids, and thus that would take points away when evaluating for kid friendliness.

A simplified example ontology is depicted below.

In addition to figuring out where destinations fit into vacation themes -- like romantic getaway, family vacation, girls getaway, or outdoor -- the site also does sentiment matching to determine if users liked a particular hotel or activity. The search engine looks for sentiment words such as "like," "love," "hate," "cramped," or "good view," and knows what they mean and how they relate to the theme of the hotel and how people felt about it. It figures that information into the score it assigns each destination.

Conclusion

Yesterday, we looked at semantic, natural language processing search engine Powerset and found in some quick early testing that the results weren't that much different than Google. "If Google remains 'good enough,' Powerset will have a hard time convincing people to switch," we wrote. But while semantic search may feel rather clunky for the broader global web, it makes a lot of sense in specific verticals. The ontology is a lot more focused and the site also isn't trying to answer specific questions, but rather attempting to semantically determine general concepts, such as romanticness or overall quality. The upshot is that the results are tangible and useful.

I asked Yen Lee what UpTake thought about the top-down vs. the traditional bottom-up approach. Lee told me that he thinks the top-down approach is a great way to lead into the bottom-up Semantic Web. Lee thinks that top-down efforts to derive meaning from unstructured and semi-structured data, as well as efforts such as Yahoo!'s move to index semantic markup, will provide an incentive for content publishers to start using semantic markup on their data. Lee said that many of UpTake's partners have already begun to ask how to make it easier for the site to read and understand their content.

Vertical search engines like UpTake might also provide the consumer face for the Semantic Web that can help sell it to consumers. Being able to search millions of reviews and opinions and have a computer understand how they relate to the type of vacation you want to take is the sort of palpable evidence needed to sell the Semantic Web idea. As these technologies get better, and data becomes more structured, then we might see NLP search engines like Powerset start to come up with better results than Google (though don't think for a minute that Google would sit idly by and let that happen...).

What do you think of UpTake? Let us know int he comments below.