Donald Patterson: First of all, HTML has "semantics" in it to start with.
Mike Perkowitz: i just dont buy that normal people are ever going to be doing complex web queries, with whatever UI
Donald Patterson: What if blogs published RDF automatically?
Mike Perkowitz: academic types always want to do complex queries and real people never do
Donald Patterson: HMM.... Good point...
Donald Patterson: The complicated queries tend to be done in a special web site.
Mike Perkowitz: and $20 says nobody really uses it in real life, even the researchers
Donald Patterson: Well, I've used Luke's system. That was pretty convenient, but it's a generalization of Evite which is obviously useful if not annoying.
Mike Perkowitz: yeah
Donald Patterson: Froogle is sort of early Semantic Web
Mike Perkowitz: yeah
Donald Patterson: They ask catalog companies to augment their catalog with RDF for aggregation efficienty
Mike Perkowitz: yeah
Mike Perkowitz: and since if you dont do it, you dont get googled, everyone does it
Mike Perkowitz: but if its driven by google and catalogs, its not going to look like what the academics want
Donald Patterson: Amazon refused to do it. They didn't want to be dis-intermediated.
Donald Patterson: Nothing ever looks like what the academics want.
Mike Perkowitz: thank god
Mike Perkowitz: i guess amazon felt large enough to refuse?
Mike Perkowitz: yeah
Mike Perkowitz: its google. no one can afford to not be googled
Mike Perkowitz: well true
Donald Patterson: It was just a bad decision because they would lose all their advertising avenues, including ads for other parts of their website.
Mike Perkowitz: well but when you click on a froogle link, you get the regular page on the site, so you can still show whatever crap you want
Mike Perkowitz: yeah
Donald Patterson: Yes, but what if you want to offer a bundle deal for the iPod *and* the headphones. You can offer that, but Google can't.
Mike Perkowitz: its the same problem that shopbot had
Donald Patterson: Amazon might have been noodling search at that point anyway
Mike Perkowitz: its just that google is the 800 lb gorilla and no one can afford to refuse
Donald Patterson: Google has become entirely dependent on advertising.
Donald Patterson: Semantic Web will kill advertising
Donald Patterson: Google will not allow semantic email to become what it could be
Donald Patterson: And they hold the key to the information now.
Mike Perkowitz: hmm