June 2008 Archives

Exactly one week ago this blog reported that a shortage of IT workers loomed, thanks in part to a 20 percent drop this year in college students majoring in IT disciplines. That's the supply end of the equation.

Now comes good news from the demand side (courtesy of BusinessWeek.com):

A new survey out this week from AeA, the group formerly known as the American Electronics Association, reports that jobs in the technology industry are growing at a healthy clip, especially in large cities. The organization's Cybercities 2008 survey says that 51 cities added high-technology jobs in 2006, the most recent year for which data were available. The survey tracks new jobs related to the creation of tech products, including fields such as chip manufacturing and software engineering.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the metro area showing the largest growth in number of jobs was Seattle (to which we can add one more job with the departure of that young Gates fellow from Microsoft). Next were the New York and Washington, D.C. metro areas.

On a percentile basis, the fastest-growing metro area was Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif., where tech jobs increased by 12 percent. Pretty interesting, but even more interesting is:

The highest concentration of technology workers -- 286 for every 1,000 workers -- was in, no surprise, Silicon Valley. Boulder, Colo., came in second, with 230, and Huntsville, Ala.; Durham, N.C.; and Washington rounded out the top five in density.

Combine the IT worker shortage with the rising cost of commuting and the increased ability of tech professionals to do their jobs from home, and it all adds up to a pretty sweet picture for members of Geek Nation. And if that's not enough, they might not even have to bother learning those social skills everyone keeps insisting they acquire. Revenge of the nerds, indeed.

From the Department of Unintended Irony:

Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg sure could use a good dictionary. He seems very confused regarding the meaning of the word "conspiracy." From Tom Krazit at CNET News.com:

The head of the telecom giant seemed a bit irritated about Apple's march into the mobile phone industry when he answered a question posed by the Financial Times about Apple's chances of reaching the mass market with the iPhone 3G by saying, "There goes the conspiracy again. You're declaring them a winner before they've earned it on the field."

Let's consult Merriam-Webster's online dictionary:

Main Entry: conspiracy

1: the act of conspiring together
2 a: an agreement among conspirators b: a group of conspirators

In case that's not clear...

Main Entry: conspire

1 a: to join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act or an act which becomes unlawful as a result of the secret agreement

Conspire much, Verizon?

Among the many tributes and retrospectives in anticipation of Bill Gates' retirement from Microsoft on Friday, John Foley over at InformationWeek offers us "a few things you didn't know" about the tech titan.

John's anecdotes, while interesting, are limited insofar as they are based on his personal experiences with the Microsoft co-founder. Thus I suspected he was merely scratching the surface of the "Gates we don't know" story. Determined to dig deeper, I embarked on a salvia-fueled Google search and came up with the following information about Bill Gates, the man and the legend:

Secretly planning professional wrestling career. Will enter squared circle next year at Wrestlemania XXV under the name Bill "Gates of Hell."

Once challenged Stephen Hawking to a 5K race.

Tryst in Redmond love nest with cartoon character Wanda Fairiewinkle spawned love child -- Leo of Little Einsteins.

Becomes enraged when people round down pi to 3.14.

Has a calculator in his head -- literally. The Texas Instruments TI-30 was implanted into his cranium by a team of Johns Hopkins interns in 1979.

Sleeps with his iPhone.

Likes to joke that company name was inspired by one of Paul Allen's body parts.

Landed in Bosnia several years ago under heavy sniper fire -- oops, sorry, that was Hill, not Bill.

Turned down by Gartner Research last year for junior analyst's job -- "not familiar enough with PC market."

Intends to endorse line of men's "Micro" Thongs.

If you're in IT worker, forget all those worries about competition from overseas workers. And, if the recent news is correct, forget all those dark rumors of a flat compensation environment (which is a fancy way of saying "no raise.") Because you're in demand, you're wanted -- heck, you're needed like never before.

A news report says, in short, that not many young people are going into IT anymore. College programs are drying up -- meaning shortages of workers loom. From the article:

"There's a bit of a perfect storm going on," said Katherine Spencer Lee, executive director of Robert Half Technology, a California-based consulting and staffing service. "I do think it's serious and I do think we need to start at the elementary school level and get students talking about math and science."

Math and science? Dude, that's way too complicated. I just want to play with my iPhone. 

The change in the trend line is substantial. From the article: "The Computing Research Association's annual survey of universities with Ph.D.-granting programs found a 20 percent drop this year in students completing bachelors degrees in professional IT fields, continuing a trend seen for several years." 

I don't know what could have scared young people away. It couldn't have been that ceaseless drumbeat of headlines about overseas outsourcing, was it? Or the tough reality that staying employed in IT requires you to constantly learn and relearn sophisticated new technologies? 

Of course, if there's a shortage of IT professionals, there's always a solution. Just try increasing wages...

Remember the beginning of "Jerry Maguire?" Tom Cruise has a revelation one night and writes a company-wide memo about how unethical and off-track his sports agent business is.

Well, we all know what happened to Jerry Maguire. (Unfortunately, "You had me at hello" also happened in that movie, but I digress.)

Fast forward to Yahoo's infamous, so-called "peanut butter" memo of 2006. The Yahoo exec who penned the memo has been Jerry Maguired. It was reported Thursday that three more executives have decided to jump ship, according to two blogs -- AllThingsD and TechCrunch -- and the New York Times. The reports were based on unnamed sources with knowledge of the situation.

The best known of the trio, Brad Garlinghouse, a senior vice president, wrote a scathing memo in 2006, arguing that Yahoo had gone awry and needed a major housecleaning. The so-called manifesto became known as the "peanut butter" memo.

Garlinghouse's departure is the latest loss for the struggling search giant. The Sunnyvale company lost four other prominent leaders in the past week, and the exodus could worsen Yahoo's instability.

Speaking of company memos, Mike Elgan over at Datamation.com writes in his column that in the confusion between private email and official business communication, workers' rights are being trampled. Resurrecting the company memo could clarify this issue.

Elgan writes:

A federal appeals court ruled this week that companies can't read your e-mail or instant messages without your permission if you or your employer are using an outside service provider.

That covers, for example, e-mail sent via Gmail or chats via AIM. And it even covers you if the employer outsources the provision of e-mail or chat and provides you with the PC, laptop, phone or pager. As part of the ruling, the court also prohibited contracted companies from providing e-mails or IM logs if they're requested by the companies that are their customers.

... To users, personal e-mail -- even if sent via the company's network and e-mail servers -- and especial chat are akin to random, casual spoken conversation (and therefore as privacy-protected speech). So people "drop their guard" via e-mail and chat, and make off-the-cuff, half-baked, comments. They vent, say things they don't really mean or speak in a way that's acceptable for a private conversation with a friend, but unacceptable professional business communication.

Check out Elgan's column, and say a toast tonight to Mr. Peanut Butter, Brad Garlinghouse.

As promised, our Semantic Web site has Part 2 of Dan Grigorovici's detailed -- and, more to the point, understandable -- analysis of the credibility problems facing the Semantic Web (the concept, not the site) in the business and investment communities.

I could give you Dan's bullet points here, but that would defeat the purpose because his analysis really is worth reading, especially if you're a member of the semweb community frustrated by the technology's inability to be embraced beyond what I termed yesterday as the "geek ghetto."

Look, there's no doubt that technologists love to talk technology. It's their passion, and that's eminently understandable. But they're so used to talking to each other that they frequently fail to effectively communicate the "value proposition" of the technology in question to the outside world. Indeed, technologists often bristle at terms like "value proposition" and "elevator pitch."

The thing is, the Semantic Web undoubtedly has a tremendous and transformative value proposition. What it lacks is a compelling and concise elevator pitch -- unless, of course, a cascading outage of transmission and generation facilities stalls the elevator for eight hours or so. But that sort of singular event hardly is one upon which you should build a business plan. Plus you couldn't get lunch money from a hot and irritable VC, never mind seed funding.

Those of you not currently stuck in elevators can read Part 2 of Dan's analysis right here.

If you're a technologist currently involved in the Semantic Web, or even if you're not but are interested in how the Semantic Web (linked data) eventually will 1) work within the enterprise, 2) provide value to business or 3) be used by consumers, I strongly recommend you read this article on our Semantic Web site by Dan Grigorovici.

A self-described "data geek," Dan is vice president of data strategies and analytics at Tacoda, a division of AOL that runs behavioral targeting advertising networks. He believes the Semantic Web community is undermining the technology's commercial progress by failing to make a coherent, understandable business case.

It's the lack of business focus and basic ability to answer some simple questions that are at the core of the continued lack of realization of even the smallest sign of a killer Semantic Web app.

Dan writes that he has suspected this for awhile and that his suspicions have been confirmed by talking recently with a number of venture capitalists, who for some odd reason stubbornly focus on the business proposition of any technology rather than, say, the logic of ontologies.

After more than seven years of promising the Semantic Web deliverance, we still can't get our one-pagers clear. We still can't explain our proposition to users, funders, or anyone else outside the community, what we are building and how it is better than the "dumb" (but increasingly crowd-telligent) and newspaper-ish web of today.

I've been at the LinkedData Planet conference for two days, listening to numerous speakers, and I have to agree completely. The technologists here mostly are talking to each other on their own terms, and even when they try to relate the Semantic Web to enterprise use, information management and business value, too many sound like they're speaking business as a second language. No doubt, the value is real, but I'm not sure that any venture capitalist or CEO in the audience would walk away inspired to climb on board.

Dan's piece offers some ideas to help Semantic Web technologists and entrepreneurs sharpen their pitches to the outside world, but what he really seeks to do is begin a dialog -- a collaboration, if you will -- within the Semweb community to "face the challenges coming from the business crowd and address them."

We're going to publish Part 2 of his article soon, and Dan promises to write regularly about this important issue. Stay tuned.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is here at LinkedData Planet. He just gave a press conference that still has my head spinning, because he talks really fast. Oh, plus he's brilliant. Now he's giving the show's special keynote on the "Web of Data." The Grand Ballroom is packed.

Having created the World Wide Web nearly 20 years ago, he now is proselytizing for what he calls the "Linked Open Data Movement." His basic premise is that the way data is accessed now is primitive compared to what will come. That's because the semantic web (or Web 3.0 or linked open data) will allow information to accessed contextually.  More specifically, he says:

Users will be able to explore linked data on the web and find new data sources

Users will be able to find interesting patterns

Machines will be able to find all matching patterns in the data out there

Users will be able to query across previously unconnected sources

Users will be able to analyze the results a la spreadsheet

Users can see the data in terms of timelines and maps

Sounds a lot better than your typical schlocky Google search, if you ask me.

Berners-Lee addressed the security issues raised by this increased contextualization of data. Specifically, organizations are worried that the development of "linked open data" will cause proprietary information to be exposed. He says that won't happen if the organizations don't want them to. There are still firewalls and other security measures which the advent of semantic web technology won't be able to breach. (Yes, I'm dumbing this down, but you try to keep up with him.)

Thank God, he just said, "It's difficult to explain. It's a paradigm shift, and we haven't got the terms."

In trying to find Kingsley Idehen's morning keynote presentation online (found; see previous post), I stumbled across his blog at OpenLink Software. Lots of great info, including links to an interview we did with him and Dr. James Hendler of RPI (also a speaker here).

One thing that caught my eye on Kingsley's blog is "the first of a series of posts geared towards showcasing practical use of the burgeoning Linked Data Web." In it he provides five examples from the Library of Congress of "linked data in action," which, in the end, is what the typical IT pro would be interested in.

Also, Kingsley answers a couple of questions -- whether he dreamed them up to help make a point or came from actual people, I don't know. They are:

1. If you wanted to provide a bewildered but still curious novice a public example of Linked Data at work in their everyday life, what would it be?

2. What would you show the CEO or CTO of a company outside the tech industry?

That second one seems to be of particular relevance to many Datamation readers, I would think. It's worth checking out if you're trying to figure out what linked data and semantic web technology will mean to you and your enterprise.

I'm at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City for the LinkedData Planet Conference & Expo, which runs through Wednesday. It's a busy show and I'm trying to cover as much of the two tracks as possible. My self-cloning attempts having failed, I'm having to pick my shots.

Rather than trying to craft a coherent narrative -- which is being handled by the ultra-coherent Jenny Zaino over at Semantic Web, and which would be a departure for this blog anyway -- I've decided to offer you interesting quotes from some of the speakers and participants at the show.
But first, a complaint: Every table in the Grand Ballroom is supplied with two large bottles (28 oz. each) of Saratoga Natural Drinking Water. A fine vintage, no doubt, but I paid $8.95 for one bottle last night from the hotel's room service! (Yes, I needed it; I went running in Central Park and was extremely dehydrated, plus I really don't like the hotel tap water. Not to mention I can expense it.) Welcome to New York.

The opening keynote this morning was by Kingsley Idehen, who is president and CEO of OpenLink Software Inc. Kingsley's bio says he is "one of the very few individuals who have actively participated in standards compliant technology innovation across several eras ranging from early Data Access Middleware and Database Virtualization, to XML-based Web Services and Web 2.0, and now to the Semantic Web."

Here are some comments from Kingsley's keynote on "Creating, Deploying and Exploiting Linked Data":

On the Semantic Web:

"It will provide a richer linking mechanism for the web that takes us from hypertext links (documents to documents) to hyperdata links (across things that documents are about)."

With the Semantic Web, "Context, and not content, becomes king."

"Meshing, or natural data linking, will replace mashing, or brute-force data linking."

On web browsers:

Web browsers traditionally have been seen as tools for browsing the web. But now users are "no longer browsing the web, you're viewing data. So the web browser is now a data viewer."

Obviously this is a tremendous distillation of a 40-minute keynote. Kingsley's presentation is posted online; when I get the URL, I'll post it here.

Update: I found Kingsley's keynote! That's right. Who's your linked data daddy?

Newsgroups -- the venerable old workhorse of the Internet -- appear to finally be on their deathbed. Three big Internet service providers are about to give them a deathblow.

Way before Google or MySpace or YouTube, newsgroups, -- also called Usenet by us Internet old timers -- were a huge repository for information, technical help, hard-to-find drivers (and other bits of software), crazy little groups to belong to, downloadable TV shows, etc. They were somewhat popular 10-15 years ago, but in recent years they've lost subscribers to Web-based forums, chat rooms, social networking sites, and YouTube.

I found out about what looks like this critical blow to newsgroups in a piece by Larry Magid of the San Jose Mercury News, "Digital Crossroads: N.Y. deal on child porn raises other issues."

The newsgroup item is one part of a complicated announcement between New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and three Internet service providers -- Time Warner Cable, Verizon, and Sprint. It's about removing child porn, which of course is illegal and heinous. Stamping it out is the right thing to do. But the way the ISPs are going about it will hit a lot of the old newsgroups, as Magid writes:

There have been reports that these companies will block access to child porn on Usenet newsgroups, but that's not exactly true either. They're doing something far more dramatic.

Time Warner will stop hosting all newsgroups, while Verizon and Sprint will eliminate hosting newsgroups under the "Alt" hierarchy. Time Warner Cable spokesman Alex Dudley said that was "partially a business decision" because less than 2 percent of its customers subscribe to newsgroups. ...

From a free-speech perspective, I'm more disturbed by Sprint and Verizon's decision to stop serving up Alt groups than I am by Time Warner Cable's plan to cease hosting all newsgroups. Alt, short for "alternative," is the designation for groups that discuss issues that aren't allowed in the more mainstream categories such as comp (computers), soc (social issues), and talk (typically religion and politics). Alt includes groups dedicated to sex and drugs, and is reportedly where Cuomo's staff found 88 newsgroups containing child porn. But the vast majority of the material in the Alt hierarchy has nothing to do with child pornography.

I agree with Magid. It's hard to say how this will all pan out. Newsgroups appear to be dying out anyway for the most part, and many network providers are tired of hosting them. But we also need to keep an eye on ISPs that take a sledgehammer to content and end up busting up perfectly legit sites and newsgroups.

It might not last, but at least for now the sale of personal computers are projecting higher for this year, according to tech industry analyst Gartner.

Gartner on Thursday upped its forecast for worldwide shipment of PCs in 2008 to 297 million units, or 12.5% above shipments last year. Three months ago Gartner predicted an annual increase of 10.9% over '07.

The company attributes the increase to...well, I'll let Gartner tell you:

“Mobile PC shipments exceeded our expectations in the first quarter of 2008,” said George Shiffler, research director at Gartner. “Mobile PCs continue to have strong momentum and the global economic environment is proving to be less punishing than we expected."

Still, Shiffler issued an important caveat:

 "Even so, it’s a bit premature to say PC shipments won’t be impacted by a weaker global economy, especially if oil and food prices continue to soar.”

Unlike food and oil prices, the cost of mobile PCs continues to go down -- a typical trend in the tech world. Shiffler points specifically to ASUS’ Eee PC, which stellar Datamation columnist Mike Elgan wrote about earlier this month.

How much downward pressure are the Eee mini-notebooks putting on the mobile PC market? Elgan makes this prediction:

[B]y the middle of next year, "mini me too" laptops will be given away in the United States, and by so many companies that they’ll become hard to sell at any price.

Sadly, that almost describes the housing market right now.

Google co-founder aims for space 

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has put down $5 million toward a flight to the international space station with the company that has sent millionaires and even a billionaire into orbit. ...

The 34-year-old Brin, who founded Google along with Larry Page, was the moving force behind his company's sponsorship of the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize. That competition would reward the first teams to put a privately funded probe on the moon.

If he goes through with the flight, Brin could become the richest human to go into space. He ranks as the fifth-richest American on Forbes magazine's 2007 list, with an estimated net worth of $18.5 billion. -- (MSNBC)

Not exactly a "staycation." But as the old saying goes, "The rich, they're different from you and me."

Over at CNET News.com, Declan McCullough reports on answers from eight instant messaging service providers to a sobering questionnaire sent them regarding how well they protect users' privacy and security.

Their responses -- or, should I say, non-responses -- won't do much to inspire confidence among IM users that their discussions aren't being monitored by outside parties.

First, the sort-of good news (which, sadly, won't take long):

[H]alf of the services provide complete encryption: AOL Instant Messenger, Google Talk, IBM's Lotus Sametime, and Skype do. To their credit, not one service says it keeps logs of the content of users' communications.

Now to the depressing (and scary) stuff. CNET News.com asked the following three questions of all eight companies:

Have you ever received a subpoena, court order or other law enforcement request asking you to turn over information about a user's IM account?

If so, how many law enforcement requests have you received?

Have you ever received a subpoena, court order or other law enforcement request asking you to perform a live interception or wiretap, meaning the contents of your users' communications would be instantly forwarded to law enforcement?

The silence was deafening. While several responded in the affirmative to the first question, they all clammed up regarding questions two and three, with "We do not share details about requests we receive from law enforcement" being the standard dodge.

The most secretive of the bunch was social networking site Facebook, which flat-out refused to answer any questions regarding its Chat IM service. Further, McCullough writes:

As far as we can determine, [Chat] fails to use encryption to protect logging in (thus passwords can be gleaned) and fails to secure the conversations, too.

Seriously, what's up with that? I have a young daughter who wants a Facebook account. Ain't gonna happen.

I cover the semantic web (also called Web 3.0, the linked data universe, etc.) for Semanticweb.com, and sometimes it's hard to know where we are in its evolution. There are a lot of stories about standards and about what small companies or researchers are doing, but you often can't see the forest for the trees.

Thankfully, along came my Jupitermedia colleague Dan Muse, quoting, who else, Ferris Bueller. Dan shakes it up, baby, interviewing two semantic web luminaries -- Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Professor James Hendler and OpenLink Software CEO Kingsley Idehen -- and they put the size of the semantic web forest in perspective, and what kind of fertilizer it needs to grow, how much sunshine (and I'm growing tired of this growth metaphor).

Dan's story comes a week before the start of the LinkedData Planet Conference in New York. Here's a sample of the questions and answers in the article:

Q. When someone interested in exploring the Semantic Web first starts looking around, he or she might find himself/herself facing a collection of unfamiliar technologies that seem to make it harder to produce "good" content and that concern themselves with unfamiliar concepts like "ontologies" and "knowledge domains."

James Hendler: When people first started to learn about the Web they needed to learn about "hyperlinks" and "markup." Web 2.0 developers have to learn about Ajax, services, and social network mathematics. Each new Web technology brings new things with it and the leading developers push these forward, with others learning after. Should Web 3.0 be any different?

For several years I've been astonished by Starbucks' stubborn refusal to offer free wi-fi service to its customers. I live in a small community in upstate New York and can find a dozen establishments within a 10-mile radius where I can sit down, order a drink and look at porn get some work done without having to pay some telecom through the nose for a temporary wireless Internet connection.

So I was happy to see this story over the weekend:

T-Mobile USA has filed a suit against Starbucks, saying that the coffee company breached its contract by offering free wireless Internet access in a partnership promotion with AT&T. Starbucks recently began switching over its Wi-Fi service from its 7-year partnership with T-Mobile to AT&T; along with the switch in service, AT&T and Starbucks began offering free wireless access as part of its customer loyalty program.

On the downside, Starbucks isn't exactly rolling out the free service at warp speed:

Although Starbucks and AT&T hope to switch all 7,000 coffee shops to AT&T's network by the end of this year, all but two locations are still on T-Mobile's network.

Suggested slogan: Two down, 6,998 to go!

The concept of "knowledge management" has been around since the mid 1990s. And while its definition is debatable, at its core KM is about getting beyond mere "data" to capture and leverage the collective information within an organization in order to better achieve its goals.

Yet, according to the book Six Billion Minds, Managing Outsourcing in the Global Knowledge Economy, only 25 percent of companies reuse knowledge, while a mere 10 percent have access to lessons learned and best practices. It's enough to make an ITIL practitioner faint.

So what's the problem? An interesting column on CIO Update by Michael Fillios, managing director of BTM Global 2000, a strategic consultancy, lays the blame on some familiar villains: lack of time and data overload:

When was the last time you had two hours of uninterrupted time in a week to kick back, put your feet up on your desk and think? If you answered, "I don't remember" or "I do my best thinking between the hours of 3:00-5:00 in the morning," you are not alone.

As I travel around corporate America, this seems to be a growing and disturbing trend, particularly in the middle management ranks. ...

Technology has created this tsunami of data and information, but we haven't yet learned how to use technology to turn it into knowledge.

Which, when you consider that KM began back when everyone was using dial-up, is pretty amazing. So how to make KM a reality? Fillios argues that it "requires a fundamental shift in the allocation of time spent doing versus the time spent thinking."

Easier said than done, no doubt, especially as corporate cutbacks increase workloads and pressure on knowledge workers. Fillios outlines "four critical dimensions" required to allow management capability "to reach its full potential."

I'd tell you what they are, but I'm a little short on time. The column is worth checking out, though.
 

With the latest bit of bandwith-restriction news, I don't know why anyone would choose to get their high-speed Internet via the cable-TV pipe, rather than through DSL.

Now, a lot of people can't get DSL. My heart goes out to them. And Internet via the cable-TV fat pipe can be very fast. But there's a growing problem on the cable side of the fence. Companies increasingly want to charge you more, or restrict you at certain times, if you're a big downloader.

As CNET News.com reported today:

Starting Thursday, Comcast will test a new system that will throttle back or slow down traffic during times of congestion for heavy bandwidth users. The initial tests will be conducted in Chambersburg, Pa. and Warrenton, Va. Later this summer the company plans to expand testing to Colorado Springs, Colo.

Comcast, the largest cable provider in the U.S., has been under fire for months after it was discovered the company had been slowing down peer-to-peer traffic on its network. The company claimed it had singled out peer-to-peer, file-sharing traffic, because it was eating up an inordinate amount of bandwidth, which caused degradation across the rest of its customers.

Consumer groups were incensed by the tactic, and the blogosphere filled with criticism. The Federal Communications Commission is currently looking into the situation to see if Comcast has violated any of its Net neutrality principles.

How will consumers react to these tests? Will they not really notice, or will they get screwed and run screaming for DSL? (DSL uses a different delivery system, and, so far, has been pretty much immune to these problems.)

If you're an affected customer, or know someone who is, drop me an email at tdunlap@jupitermedia.com, or you can leave your comments on this blog. 

The good folks over at MIT urge us not to despair over our current economic woes and the seemingly insurmountable problems we have so generously bequeathed to our children.

And to what can we ascribe their optimism about the future? The Rapture! Oh, sorry, that's what these people are  counting on. Actually, the MIT researchers are betting that technology will help bail out our economy and address a few other nettlesome issues to boot.

Whether it's biosolar cells, household robots, electrochemical energy, or a giant fan to push away the sun to mitigate global warming (OK, that's my idea), the MIT whizzes offer hope for the future. You can read about their predictions here.

Hat tip to CNET.com, which has a nice slide show on the MIT prognostications.
 

As Semantic Web technology moves closer and closer to everyday reality, browser makers are busy adding tools to upcoming versions that will allow users to better utilize and explore the metadata they soon will be able to access.

Sean Michael Kerner over at internetnews.com explains how Mozilla is leading the way with its upcoming Firefox 3.0 browser, but that "Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) may not be far behind."

Both browsers are working to include some measure of support for microformats -- a simple means of categorizing Web content as metadata. ...

Microformats, defined by the technology's community site Microformats.org as "small bits of HTML that represent things like people, events, tags, etc. in Web pages," represent a lightweight means of bringing semantics to the Web. ...

Microsoft makes use of microformats by way of two technologies -- WebSlices and Activities -- that enable site developers to more easily pull in third-party content.

Though IE8 does have some semantic capabilities, it's unclear whether Microsoft currently considers IE a "Semantic Web browser."

Undoubtedly these changes will be slow and incremental, but unless something goes awry, the advent of the semantic web will make the Internet experience vastly different -- and better -- over the next decade as computers become increasingly able to analyze information on the web, no matter what format it's in. Or, as Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium, put it way back in 1999:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The "intelligent agents" people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

Berners-Lee, by the way, will be a keynote speaker at Jupitermedia's LinkedDataPlanet conference running from June 17-18 in New York City. (Yes, that was a plug.)