> You might notice this died about the same time "Mashups" died. Mashups were kind of an outgrowth of the Semantic Web as well. One of the reasons that whole th

> You might notice this died about the same time "Mashups" died. Mashups were kind of an outgrowth of the Semantic Web as well. One of the reasons that whole thing died was that existing business models simply couldn't be reworked to make it make sense. If I'm running an ad driven site about Cat Breeds, simply giving you all my information in an easy to parse machine readable form so your site on General Pet Breeds can exist and make money is not something I'm particularly inclined to do. You'll notice now that even some of the most permissive sites are rate limited through their API and almost all require some kind of API key authentication scheme to even get access to the data. It's still very much the reason people are more inclined to scrape a certain site, they want to simply piggy back off an existing source and charge people money for it. These types also have a tendency to 'pay as little as possible' when it comes to acquiring the data.