Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008

ReadWriteWeb has posted an article on the 10 best Semantic Web products of 2008. The top two spots are taken by Yahoo and Microsoft. Yahoo! SearchMonkey is a search platform aiming at making the search better by leveraging web annotations. Microsoft acquired Powerset, a natural language processing search engine. Who has not made the list and maybe they should have: Twine by Radar Networks, which provides a new way of tracking, finding, and sharing content, all in one place.

Open Web Foundation

Several days ago, the Open Web Foundation has been created. From the official announcement:

"The Open Web Foundation is an attempt to create a home for community-driven specifications. Following the open source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation, the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification."

You can also find a brief presentation on the announcement web page mentioned above. Some of the companies that support the efforts of the foundation are Facebook, Google, O'Reilly, Sourceforge, Yahoo, and many other.

Yahoo says no to Microsoft

In a news by ZDNet, Yahoo said no to the acquisition proposed by Microsoft, which offered 31$ per share, amounting to 44.6 billion dollars in stock and cash. The problem seems to be the amount of dollars per share offered by Microsoft, which in Yahoo's opinion underestimates the company in the sense that the merger might be rejected by the regulators. This is good news for Google who expressed its concerns in a blog at the beginning of February. I feel that the acquisition could have had a positive effect since the paid search revenues amount for 75% world wide, while Microsoft and Yahoo combined have 30% in the U.S., while outside the numbers are even lower, with Google having around 85% of the search market in Europe. A more tight competition could benefit everyone. Microsoft did respond with a news release by Microsoft's General Counsel Brad Smith.

The question that can be raised is could have these 'merger' benefited Yahoo?