I think there is a fair chance that much of the semantic web dream (i.e. "the internet organizing itself") will arrive pretty suddenly, with exponential-like growth.

There has been a very long period of ramping up, experimentation and hype, but it may only take a few good tools, some well written blog posts and some serious incentives (e.g. Yahoo's embrace) to tip it from dream to reality.

This announcement may not actually reflect the tipping point, but its a certainly a good sign, and a major step in the right direction.

'I think there is a fair chance that much of the semantic web dream (i.e. "the internet organizing itself") will arrive pretty suddenly, with exponential-like growth.'

I'm skeptical. It seems like you'd have to either solve some pretty tricky AI problems, or get people writing for the internet to do all this extra work. It might still to feature in some larger, professionally developed sites, but I'd be surprised if it took off.

Well, there is a pretty big incentive. Who wouldn't want their SERP real estate to have more attractive, more valuable information? Seems like a new kind of SEO opportunity for companies and freelance developers.

I wonder how long until we start seeing the $49.99 ebook.

A search engine that applied a bonus for sites with well organized semantic information would be an interesting idea.

Actually the embrace of big search engines might be the death-kiss for the semantic web, as blackhat SEO will game the data and the little valuable content that exists will be drowned by junk & spam.