Describing a company or concept as "Web 2.0" is so, last half-decade. Nevermind that most people still haven’t heard the phrase. If you don’t believe me, go ahead and poll your office or family: unless you’re not allowed out of the IT dungeon or your family all work as tech-bloggers, my guess is that they haven’t heard or don’t understand the term.

This isn’t really surprising. If you hear about a "new internet phenomenoon" on mainstream news, the chances are it’s either on it’s way out or is so firmly entrenched as to be unremarkable. For a perfect example of this, look up ‘Facebook’ in a national publication and note the language used to describe it’s shiny-new cover–regardless of the fact that most people reading this blog will have been on Facebook (or gone off Facebook) at least a year ago!

It even now seems that there may be a financial impact on describing your new startup as "web 2.0". According to Mashable!, several VC’s are stating quite clearly that they won’t back Web 2.0. I have also noticed talk of bubbles breaking and ‘meteoric rises’ with the implication that it won’t last very much longer. So many potential break-throughs won’t see their funding if they’re too 2.0.

This phenomenon is firmly entrenched in ‘techy’ social networks like Digg. When I dugg a news story about the semantic web, I noticed the overwhelming majority of comments were along the lines of "semantic web is so cliche", or "Watch out, here comes Semantic Web 2.0, Run!".

After my trial implementation of  AdaptiveBlue’s Smartlink technology on this very site, I was contacted by Director of Business Development, Fraser Kelton, who agreed to a Questions and Answers session about Adaptive Blue’s new technology. For a quick introduction, I have been trying out AdaptiveBlue’s Blue Organiser for a few weeks and found their semantic features helpful and intuitive for finding and retreiving changing information, and decided to try out the Smartlink code to offer this to readers of my blog:

• What makes a link Smart?

  Traditional links are not smart, they’re simple pointers to pages. When we write about a book and link to the book’s page on Amazon we mean to link to the thing but the link points to the page.

  A link is smart when it’s capable of automatically identifying and understanding what the thing is on the page. Once the link is identified to mean a thing a lot of valuable information can be automatically presented to the user that’s contextually correct for the thing.

After my trial implementation of AdaptiveBlue’s Smartlink technology on this very site, I was contacted by Director of Business Development, Fraser Kelton, who agreed to a Questions and Answers session about Adaptive Blue’s new technology. For a quick introduction, I have been trying out AdaptiveBlue’s Blue Organiser for a few weeks and found their semantic features helpful and intuitive for finding and retreiving changing information, and decided to try out the Smartlink code to offer this to readers of my blog:

• What makes a link Smart?

  Traditional links are not smart, they’re simple pointers to pages. When we write about a book and link to the book’s page on Amazon we mean to link to the thing but the link points to the page.

  A link is smart when it’s capable of automatically identifying and understanding what the thing is on the page. Once the link is identified to mean a thing a lot of valuable information can be automatically presented to the user that’s contextually correct for the thing.

In a bid to test a bit of the Semantic Web, I have inserted a little line of Java script into my blog which should automatically turn many of my links Smart. Not 8 hours after I had inserted the script, I was contacted by Fraser at AdaptiveBlue, the creaters of the Smartlink technology, who asked how I was finding the new links. After offering me some advice about ‘Turning on Smartlinks in my Blog’, Fraser also agreed to a Question and Answer post about AdaptiveBlue (watch this space…)

Because I have been trialling BlueOrganiser for a few weeks, I am somewhat familiar with the technology, and do find it useful. I have not, however, noticed any of my links becoming ‘Smart’ of their own accord. I did manage to manually make a couple of links smart by adding a bit of HTML to the blog article (<smartlink="yes") which enabled AdaptiveBlue’s flashy menu with information on Apple and the iPhone. However, the automatic tech doesn’t seem to have worked with my Drupal website (after inserting the code in the page.tpl.php file–just like Google Analytics’ Urchin code). Fraser suggested I create the following link, to test out the smartness of my placement.

Is it Smart?

It does indeed appear to be Smart but is displaying the following error message:

"Rats! The Smart isn’t connecting to this Link…"

Oh well, it’s a step in the right direction for the Semantic Web. More on this later!