There is a lot of Web 2.0 media buzz at the moment, many people seem to feel a presence [of enthusiasm] they haven't felt since... well, Obi-Wan Dot Com, I guess.

However, there also seems to be a misconception about Web 2.0 (whatever that term may mean to you) "replacing" the Semantic Web effort, or that - as written in an article in the current iX issue - the Semantic Web "was a failure", and "lost against" Web 2.0.

Yesterday, I gave a talk (slides, mostly in german, I'm afraid) at a ZGDV Conference in Darmstadt and tried to demystify this SemWeb "versus" Web 2.0 perception a little bit. I tried to show that the concepts are not that easy to compare really, that the technology behind actually follows common goals, and that the whole discussion shouldn't be taken too seriously. Of course there is a mind share (and developer market) contest, but that's more or less all it boils down to when you analyse the "competition". See for example the rather childish "we are lowercase semantic web" claim of microformats. They are cool, pragmatic, and completely in line with the Semantic Web idea ("semantics for structured data on the web"). Hopefully we'll soon see some apps that demonstrate how the whole market could gain a lot if people would work together more actively (the GRDDL activity is a great example) instead of wasting their energy in politics (IMOSHO).

The talk itself went fine (I think), too speedy towards the end as I ran out of time (as usual), where I surely lost a few people. But feedback was positive (as opposed to last webmonday, where I introduced the idea behind paggr and felt like Marty McFly after his guitar solo in BTTF ;).
Leo blogged, too, including funny photos of me (in hacker camouflage). I took some of him in return (see below). He gave an entertaining talk - on Semantic Desktops as you might've guessed - and started the whole thing with a "personal user interfaces in hollywood movies" quiz game, successfully waking up everyone in the room with mozartkugeln as incentive.