2002 called, they want your comment back. No seriously, semantic web has been talked about for a long time. People don't understand it, don't care and don't see how it will make them money.

Google is starting to look at microformat data. All that needs to happen in order for more semantic tech to take off is the search engines paying attention.

As soon as a technology translates into an edge on the web, it'll get implemented. This fixes the monetary motivation problem, and forces people to solve the other two :)

Be that as it may, the Semantic Web community and the data it requires in order to exist are still growing, much faster than when I started blogging about it in January 07.

People are starting to care but the "adoption rate" is so low because, as you said, people don't understand it. I still struggle with the subject. Not the underlying concepts, but the picture as a whole.

From an "insider's perspective" I can say with confidence that what we hope the Semantic Web will bring us is going to come about. I just personally no longer believe in "well, here is the old Web, and then here's the day we switch on the Semantic Web. See the difference?"

A subset of the SW, Linked Data, seems to be gathering some momentum. I still think that we are going to hit an inflection point where there is enough linked data to enable great apps, which will drive more people to publish linked data. In this case, the uptake could accelerate rapidly. OTOH, you might be right. I like RDF+RDFS but OWL, while interesting, seems very heavy weight to me.

I worked at one of the bigger semweb startups for a few years, been to the major conferences several times... the whole concept of putting structure to data makes a lot of sense. However, an explicit ontology is not necessary to make data useful. RDF is a great technology that exploits the generality of graphs, but I'm not sure if and when it's going to catch on. I'd still rather use JSON for most of my transport layer stuff.