Okay, for those of you who had trouble focussing long enough to read my last post, here's the executive summary.
Everybody wants to know what's coming next for the web.
Lots of people think it's going to be the semantic web, but I disagree.
The semantic web will never happen because there is no economic incentive to create it.
The web is not about semantic documents, the web is about processing data into information.
The software that does the processing is the important part: these are web APIs.
APIs are soon going to hit critical mass, and begin to feed off of each other, multiplying exponentially.
The value created will be largely unexpected, because the interaction of services is hard to predict.
This explosion of new services and data will be the emergent web.
It is going to be a game-changing event, comparable to the birth of the web itself.
The way to get on board is to start building APIs, especially meta-APIs.
Still pretty long, but hopefully you could get to the end of that one. If you want to learn more about my reasoning, then read the original post.