[semantic web failure?]

Two days ago I blogged about the negative reactions My Space elicits by limiting personalisation (specifically in the case of adding particular widgets to My Space profiles). Interestingly, Stephen Downes sees this kind of mentality as securing the downfall of the semantic web. "The Semantic Web will never work because it depends on businesses working together, on them cooperating."

Read on:

"And I'm saying the semantic web won't work. Can't work.But how do you explain that intuition?And I was thinking about the edgy things of Web 2.0, and where they're working, and more importantly, where they're beginning to show some cracks.A few of key things today:- Yahoo is forcing people to give up their Flickr identities and to join the mother ship, and- MySpace is blocking all the widgets that aren't supported by some sort of business deal with MySpace- the rumour that Google is turning off the search APIAnd that's when I realized:The Semantic Web will never work because it depends on businesses working together, on them cooperating.We are talking about the most conservative bunch of people in the world, people who believe in greed and cut-throat business ethics. People who would steal one another's property if it weren't nailed down. People like, well, Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch.And they're all going to play nice and create one seamless Semantic Web that will work between companies - competing entities choreographing their responses so they can work together to grant you a seamless experience?Not a chance.Now - there are many technical reasons why I think the Semantic Web is a loser, along with some cultural and philosophical reasons. Namely: the people who designed the Semantic Web never read their epistemology texts.But the big problem is they believed everyone would work together:- would agree on web standards (hah!)- would adopt a common vocabulary (you don't say)- would reliably expose their APIs so anyone could use them (as if)Shall I go on?So...Maybe we won't be building clusters in Moncton, maybe we will. I don't know - I'd like to keep trying. Maybe people will listen to us or maybe (more likely) they won't.The future is not in the Semantic Web (or in Java, or in enterprise computing - all for the same reason). Careers based on that premise will founder. Because the people saying all the semantic-webbish things - speak the same language, standardize your work, orchestrate the services - are the people who will shut down the pipes, change the standards, and look out for their own interests (at the expense of yours)."