Semantic Web or: why Yahoo! resisted Microsoft’s takeover
David Peterson speculates on why Yahoo! rejected the recent Microsoft takeover bid.
With the recent announcement from Yahoo and subsequent flurry of posts that followed, something became clear to me. Yahoo! didn’t accept Microsoft’s offer because it had an ace card up its sleeve. Semantic technology. With this sort of tech, who needs Microsoft or even Google for that matter? Yahoo! is positioned to leapfrog what has been possible in a Web 2.0 world. I have previously blogged about Peter Mika’s launch of microsearch which was a test bed for the upcoming SearchMonkey launch. SearchMonkey will allow for global scale and fast access to almost all forms of metadata on the web.
Of course it may also explain why Microsoft launched the takeover bid in the first place…
I was really interested in microformats at one stage but everyone I spoke to about them dismissed them, I think I’m going to go and have another look and try recapture a little of that initial excitement.
I’ve sort of being avoiding MicroFormats all together but can see I can’t carry on like that for much longer…
[...] I recently read over at disassociated.com (well they link to an article about it) that Microformats may indeed be part of the next generation [...]