I wouldn't say that the Semantic Web has failed... it's moving slowly, but it's been adopted more and more. These sort of standards seem to have a critical mass

I wouldn't say that the Semantic Web has failed... it's moving slowly, but it's been adopted more and more. These sort of standards seem to have a critical mass kind of life... maybe compounded by the Internet hype machine. Microframeworks for example have been very effective. I also hope we'll soon have something like FOAF spreading. Even Digg has made much of its context semantic now (check the source code)