RSS used to be a hard sell, now most people seem to buy into the idea. Even though readers / aggregating homepages were around and people used them, no one seemed to think that the connection was being made between RSS and custom homepages. That fear seems to be gone, and RSS has won popular appeal… though it seems to have lost all buzz (no one really cared when google didn’t include a browser rss icon in Chrome). Now the hard sell seems to be semantic. People just don’t get that into structured data – and really it does sound pretty boring. Web2.0 was easier to sell, because it involved social networking and mass crowds. Semantic web is a harder sell because it involves primarily data organization. Eventually it should enhance interactions – but just telling someone that they need to have their data organized because at some point there may be tools that take advantage of the structure of data to enhance users ability to interact with your data, potentially in a way that takes advantage of the social graph… well, that’s nice, but who really cares? And why should people invest in something so early stage?
I love the theory of the semantic web, and microformats in particular – but semantic is not sexy… and it needs to be. Thoughts? How do you pitch the semantic web?