August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web is a science fiction story looking back at Google’s rise to global e-commerce dominance through a Semantic Web strategy. The pieces of this include spidering RDF files, offering desktop clients, then knitting the whole thing together through a reputation management system.

Is this information literature?

The cultural future of the Semantic Web is a tricky one. Privacy is a huge concern, but too much privacy is unnerving. Remember those taxonomies? Well, a group of people out of the Cayman Islands came up with a “ghost taxonomy” - a thesaurus that seemed to be a listing of interconnected yacht parts for a specific brand of yacht, but in truth the yacht-building company never existed except on paper - it was a front for a money-laundering organization with ties to arms and drug smuggling. When someone said “rigging” they meant high powered automatic rifles. Sailcloth was cocaine. And an engine was weapons-grade plutonium.

So, you’re a small African republic in the midst of a revolution with a megalomaniac leader, an expatriate Russian scientist in your employ, and 6 billion in heroin profits in your bank account, and you need to buy some weapons-grade plutonium. Who does it for you? Google Personal Agent, your web-based pal