There is a good amount of chatter about the semantic web out there, but not a ton of concrete, working examples. I decided to put our Best Buy data to work and publish BBY SKUs in RDFa, using the GoodRelations e-commerce ontology. As I see it, simply publishing the RDFa is not an issue — the challenge is to apply real-world style and structure to the code to make it both machine and human readable. I’m trying to answer the question: is the RDFa model flexible enough to allow Joe Web Developer to successfully publish valid structured data while satisfying the desires of his design, business, and marketing counterparts?

I’m pleased with the first round of results, ~460K worth of “next-gen” product detail pages. Take a look at some choice example SKUs from the Best Buy product catalog:

• Music SKU: http://products.semweb.bestbuy.com/y/products/9312861/
• Movies SKU: http://products.semweb.bestbuy.com/y/products/7590289/
• Software SKU: http://products.semweb.bestbuy.com/y/products/9509686
• Games SKU: http://products.semweb.bestbuy.com/y/products/9346442/
• “Hardgoods” SKU: http://products.semweb.bestbuy.com/y/products/8967228/

Interested parties can get a full URL list here (txt, gz), or split up into list 1, list 2, and list 3 (txt).

Thanks to: Martin Hepp, Andreas Radinger, Alex Stolz, Yahoo! Searchmonkey, Jason Galep (design guidance), and Best Buy Remix.

I saw an interesting post today via Twitter from a local person hosting an SEO competition to see who gets the highest Google search result for the key words zompire dracularius. I am officially throwing my hat in the ring. Recently I have been investigating how good semantic markup (including RDFa/Microformats) in the front-end will improve or change the way search engines work — basically how POSH (plain old semantic html) delivers data directly to the browser with particular markup. For the purposes of this test I have employed some semantic markup techniques, plus a few other tactics to raise the visibility of my post:

• Using RDFa in my posts (dublin core)
• Creating a “human readable” URL for this post using permalink structure built into WordPress
• Providing links to the original post and other sources (I will attempt to trackback, although no trackback link is published)
• Send to social networking sites I participate in — this is done automatically when I publish a post on my blog to Friendfeed, Twitter and Facebook
• Attempt to leverage my blog’s overall visibility to force my post about zompire dracularius to the top
• Leave a comment on the original blog declaring the contest
• Have an adequate number of references to “zompire dracularius”

While it seems a little “Black Hat SEO”/ dirty to me, I will ignore that feeling for a while for the purposes of the experiment. Results to come!