Significant news for the spread of Semantic Web standards was published on the 1^st of May, when Digg officially announced that it would become a “beta tester” for RDFa by applying it to its content. Digg is a social news aggregator which decided to put RDF into real-world use by implementing it as metadata for XML on its site. RDF triples can subsequently be extracted from the markups. The news was announced on Digg’s blog in a rather modest statement by Steve Williams, one of the principal moderators: “We’ve added RDFa, making Digg part of the “semantic web” where Web pages become more sophisticated, beyond simply words and pictures.” The move may appear discrete at first sight, but it is in fact a sign of a large shift in the growing adoption of Semantic Web standards and Data Portability on the Web. Digg announced its membership of the Data Portability group last January.

 http://digg.com/

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On the 28^th of April, Ben Werdmuller introduced the Open Data Definition in a guest post on Steve O’Hear’s blog. The Open Data Definition http://opendd.net/ is one of the most recent efforts to build Data Portability between Social Networks and user data, for import and export of data between social sites. He discusses the current (what he refers to as) “half-solutions” available for transferring data, such as services giving the user access to his data through third party tools, and other existing solutions, such as SOAP, RDF and FOAF. However, it is lamentable that he focuses on dismissing the usefulness of such languages by pointing out their shortcomings, for example, saying that RDF is “…prone to ambiguity and overcomplicated implementation”. However, this may be part of a marketing strategy for his application, the ODD built into Elgg, the open source social application engine. Any reference to Google Open Social API is also noticeably missing from the post. 

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