With due respect, I think you, and even more aggresiously Clay Shirkey, have been misrepresenting what the Semantic Web is, and critiquing based on that misunderstanding, not on the reality. Folks like Danny Hillis and Nova Spivack who were listening got
Regarding links: back about 12 years ago we built a software framework in the (then new) Java language named "Roku". Our ontology in Roku (Japanese for 'six') broke everything into one of six categories (Who, What, When, Where, Why and How).
The Semantic Web Research Group is a group of people working with Semantic Web technology inside the MIND LAB at University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies
H. Chen, F. Perich, D. Chakraborty, T. Finin, and A. Joshi. Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 2, page 854--861. Washington, DC, USA, IEEE Computer Society, (2004)
A. Ankolekar, M. Krötzsch, T. Tran, and D. Vrandecic. WWW '07: Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web, page 825--834. New York, NY, USA, ACM Press, (2007)