The semantic web is apparently a sponsored thing:

Facebook has just given us an idea of how quickly these widgets are being adopted: a week after f8, 50,000 websites now feature the Like button and the other new plugins.

There were plenty of people who thought that it would happen some other way - but what was really needed was a critical mass of social users (all the Facebook users) who could be encouraged to start using simple "semantic web" stuff such as the "like" button. I'm part of that 50k - look at the bottom of this post :)

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