WebTilting

The web is trendy:

Ajax (not really new) caught the dev's imagination - even BEA Weblogic just added a bit to their portfolio
The journalistic (reverse-chrono) approach to homepages got millions more people to have a homepage
MS did wonders for their PR by having a blogger (Scoble), a lot of people still take Dave Winer seriously
Ruby/Rails is easy web dev (so I'm told)
RSS tools are mostly badly built, yet it's useful and widely deployed - is polling an innovation? Different format?
commerce orgs (without legacy) in the web environment get creative - Amazon
Web 2.0 was a PR exercise that went Frankenstein

must be a pattern here - is it tangible benefit for the end user?

is there a way of doing SemWeb outreach that exploits the pattern? Showing?

the best there is to show of mainstream adoption of straight SemWeb tech is Oracle's inclusion of RDF in their DB, presumably prompted by the science folks