GetSemantic Introduction

[edit] Three main goals

GetSemantic has three main purposes:

providing great documentation about Semantic Web technologies
engage in advocacy - help people advocate for Semantic Web technologies and respond to misconceptions
provide a community of people to help develop unofficial standards and solutions

point web designers, developers and users towards data standards that they can use today
develop new data standards that they can use tomorrow (with Darwinism as our garbage collector)
- we are specifically interested in domain-specific information for instances where microformats aren't relevant - microformats for the 'long tail' is one of the ideas that we are interested in
- provide a home for experimental format design
provide really good semantic web documentation that is accessible to people who aren't semantic web experts
encourage discussion around building new formats, and let Darwinism be our garbage collector
pick a number of really cool things that the SemWeb could help with and implement simple tools for people to build, implement, parse and remix these new formats
be a bridge not only between microformats, rdf and the semweb communities, but between users and all three

come up with new acronyms (unless they're funny!). Acronyms and abbreviates confuse people. Lots of people use the word "blog" (even if they misuse it a lot) - but they don't use "RSS" so much. "Conversion script" makes a lot more sense to people than "GRDDL" or "XSLT".
write in language that non-experts can't understand - or at least, if there's some geeky thing that needs to be worked out, insulate that from end users.
believe we are 'competing' with microformats - we aren't. We're just another facet in the movement towards a better web.