Chris just published some content about Google's acquisition of Metaweb that got me thinking.
It seems like Google is starting to really get behind the Linked Data (semantic Web) idea, and not the weird AI-neural network flavor that is almost completely unrelated. They're getting behind the version that is actually about publishing marked-up data on the Web to increase the richness of the metadata surrounding the content.
Their recent rollout of Rich Snippets followed by this Metaweb acquisition clearly demonstrates that Google is focusing on rich content as a differentiator (a strategy I think is a very smart one). Maybe FaceBook gave them the needed kick in the pants with their proprietary open graph markup. After watching content producers' willingness to mark up their content from the sidelines, maybe Google decided they had better get in front of this if they want to stay on top of the search hill.
Whatever the reason, Google is still the 800 lb. gorilla in search with 62.6% of the market, and they direct most of the world's eyeballs. If they begin rolling out Rich Snippets and RDFa support at a high level, it will immediately mean a HUGE leg up for any content publisher that keeps their rich markup well maintained. You could potentially go from buried deep in the pile to rising to the first page of results solely because you properly mark up your content.
In the world of the Internet, more eyeballs means more money. Especially when it's from Google, who is the biggest source of free search traffic.
I can easily see this turning into a gold rush of sorts where people race to mark up their data in order to get a quick pop up to the top of the search results and attract more traffic.
This is going to create an instant market for publishing tools that make it extremely easy to published rich content, marked up to the max. It's going to be payday for content publishers that are first into the pool. And as Chris notes, there are going to be some VERY interesting opportunities to analyze and mine this data. Should make for an interesting period of time, I'm looking forward to that again 
