Right Now Is A Great Time

This is a great time to be in the Semantic Web (SW) industry, or in any industry that's thinking about using SW technology (SWT). Wilshire held its annual Semantic Technology Conference last week and it was bigger and better than ever (I wasn't there, and that's a long story), mainstream companies like Reuters and Elsevier have either launched SW ventures or are at least getting their feet wet, and the state of development tools today is vastly better than anything that existed a couple of years ago. Over the course of the last 12-24 months, different ventures have either launched or made official announcements, including Powerset, Twine (by Radar Networks), Searchmonkey, and there are a whole bunch of startups that are hoping to make a big splash sooner rather than later. Additionally, when I look at the W3C's membership list it looks a whole lot bigger than it did a couple of years ago and there are a lot more Fortune 500/Fortune 1,000 companies on there than ever before. Man, this is starting to get good!