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oEmbed is a newly released spec from Cal Henderson (of Flickr), Mike Malone and Leah Culver (of Pownce), and Richard Crowley (of OpenDNS) that allows web sites to quickly and easily embed media when a user posts a link directly to that resource. oEmbed is an open format which standardizes the process of embedding photos, videos, links, or other media and circumvents the media provider's API (or the need for screen scraping if they don't offer one). It works by turning a link to, say, a photo or video into XML or JSON that tells the user how to embed that media.

Looking at Michael Pick's video DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix and on the dataportability.com home page, I saw that RDF was included in a brief list of standards involved, and something occurred to me about the value of RDF in attempts to share data across applications such as social networking sites-in particular, why it's better than XML for this.

oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly.

The Semantic Web brings with it the opportunities for users to get smarter search results, and for site owners to get more targeted traffic as users find what they really want. But these benefits don't just magically appear. This article leads you through the aspects of both information architecture and general infrastructure you need in place to truly take advantage of this burgeoning opportunity. This article discusses what you need to know to make your Web site part of the Semantic Web. It starts with a discussion of the problems the Semantic Web tries to solve and then moves to the technologies involved, such as Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), and SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL). You'll see how the Semantic Web is layered on top of the existing Web. It then covers some issues that you want to know about when you plan a new Web site and also gives specific examples of how to use technologies like RDFa and Microformats to enable your existing Web site to become a part of the Semantic Web.