1) Semanticising information requires people, not machines (my opinion - at least for the early days). The Wikipedia model is the most obvious way of doing this, but that’s not easily replicated. They’ve actually put some thought into this, and creating a combined e-mail/blog/wiki app is a smart way of getting users to semanticise information without users realising. It’s a good idea, and I can’t think of other (very different) ways you could do this - and that’s the challenge with semantic web technologies. So based on the fact it’s an idea that works, is why it’s real.

2) At the Radar Networks blog, they said Scobles posting was “revealing”. The only examples Scoble gives to describe, are “Imagine a really awesome search engine that could bring back much much more granular stuff than Google can today. Or, heck, imagine you could view my blog by posts with most inbound links.”

That suggests he saw a blog app that did what Zoe can do for e-mail.

I thought all the patents had a similar level of detail, alhough I haven’t read them in detail - only a quick skim.

In short, I wouldn’t read too much into those patents at this point — I would wait for the claims which probably will come in a year or so.

By the way did you look up the Metaweb patents too? They are interesting. They went to the other extreme — they added so much micro-level detail that they aren’t general enough IMHO.

As for patents, we’ve debated this in our company a lot. There is real doubt about how much enterprise value patents create for social Web apps. Consequently, some of the most compelling arguments for pursuing at least a provisional patent revolve around planning for the defense against unintended patent violations.

On the other hand, they broadcast a proprietary attitude towards ideas themselves, and this is not a good thing IMHO. Many of us are uncomfortable with the notion that we should make claims on pure ideas that are really incremental variations of widespread ones. To the bean counters we’d argue that the value of giving away our ideas often trumps the marginal value of holding on to their deed of trust. Just ask the inventors of Sudoku, who have benefited hugely from the spread of their invention, helped along in no small part by the game’s lack of proprietariness [http://www.psfk.com/2007/03/soduku_creators.html].

Case in point: everyone knew that Apple would be unveiling the iPhone at this year’s Macworld, even if we didn’t know everything about it. But the dramatic unveiling of the striking device transcended the collection of ideas (some novel, some not) that makes it up.

But I didn’t mean to make them look ridiculous for the application they are building - e-mail, blogs and wikis are a smart way of getting people to “semanticise” information without them having them think they are.

The sad thing is how quickly it took me to find this information and which is available for the world to see. I couldn’t believe it, considering how much I have read concerning their secrecy.