Since the early days of Sematic Web I have been expecting that this technology would become very important for Search Engine Optimization.

Until recently, however, the most important component for this to happen has been missing: the major search engines completely ignored RDF and other semantically enriched markup.

This as changed now finally Yahoo and, more recently, Google announced to analyze and index rich mark up like microformats and RDFa.

Just today I stumbled upon a nice article by the E-business and Web Science Research Group of the Universität der Bundeswehr München titled GoodRelations and Yahoo SearchMonkey with five very practical examples how to enhance your web pages for better relevance in the Yahoo search index.
They make use of RDFa and the GoodRelations Web Ontology.

This is all very exciting and I expect way more to come!

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Layar Developer

Only a few days ago I mentioned Layar as the ideal platform for rapid development of Augmented Reality applications. I applied for a developer key and was granted one of the limited 50 available keys for the initial launch phase (thanks SPRXmobile!).

With this grant comes an understandable NDA, so I can only speak about the program in very general terms. Just let me tell that the platform looks really flexible and developer friendly. I’m excited to be part of this initial community and will update my experiences as soon as I’m allowed to share them!

In the mean time, if you have an idea for a (commercial) Augmented Reality application feel free to contact me, we might be able to work something out on the short term.

About Layar

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Update: this idea is realized now the 2.0 Layar client is live (Aug 17th, 2009)!

Lately, there’s a lot of buzz going about TwitARound, an Augmented Reality app for the iPhone. Quote from Gizmodo:

…nearby live tweets show up on the horizon, and you can see where they’re coming from, as well as how far away they are. It uses the compass along with the accelerometer GPS to do its location thing, so it’s restricted to the iPhone 3GS in this implementation, even if it is developed almost entirely in WebKit.

Judging by this description, there is nothing that prevents this from working on any Android powered device.

Even better, there exists this nice new Android app, called Layar, which can load augmented reality layers from a supposedly simple data file (coded in json serialization). They will be opening their API shortly by giving an initial 50 API keys for some lucky developers. I applied for one with this idea, hope to test it out soon!

More about TwittARound in this youtube demo:

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