When I graduated from college a couple of years ago, there was this buzzing in academic circles of a semantic web. The world wide web had been about information exchange between people. The semantic web was going to take a step further and allow information exchange between machines.
From the wikipedia entry:

Semantic Web is a project that intends to create a universal medium for information exchange by giving meaning (semantics), in a manner understandable by machines, to the content of documents on the Web.

The interesting thing is for the last month or so, I’ve been using the semantic web. Flickr, del.icio.us and 43Things support the use of tags. Tags are really a loosely defined format for describing a piece of data (i.e. semantics!). RSS/Atom and Aggregators are another good example.

None of this really clicked in my head until I read this presentation eTech/2004/realworldsemantics. It’s from last year’s Emerging Tech Conference (Darn! Have I become that outdated? It only takes me a year to learn about these things). The 2005 Emerging Tech Conference (going on right now) seems to be continuing this thread. Maybe I’ll go for the 2006 conference so I won’t feel so out of date in 2007.

At the very least, I can say I’ve heard Rael’s talk. It was a interesting presentation describing people “remixing” products to use in new and interesting ways. His weblog makes for pretty interesting reading too.