mpt:
But here's the kicker: Google only works by accident. Most people put links in a Web page because they add value to that particular page, not because they contribute to Google's database of authority. (Blogrolls are a notable exception.) The links just happen to work extremely well for measuring authority as well, and the rest is history.
This isn't the Semantic Web, it's the Serendipitous Web. And I think in the long run, in a world full of lazy humans, serendipity is the only kind of semantic information gathering that will work.
You got it. This is the central concept of my data links user interface. We can make computing more useful by smartly and automatically "figuring out" the metadata.