Joe Gregorio
So Google launched Google Base, and John Battelle points back to Paul Ford's article August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web. There's only one little problem with pointing back to Paul's essay in the light of Google Base and that problem is that Paul was wrong. The entire point of Paul's speculative essay is that "Google Marketplace", as Paul named it, was driven by RDF and the Semantic Web. Here we are three years later and Google Base is live but there's no RDF involved; not an ontology in sight. Just like I said three years ago in The Well-Formed Web, the vision is nice, it just doesn't need RDF.