Yahoo makes the World’s metadata available through BOSS

I’m thrilled to spread the news further that we have just made available all public metadata (microformats, eRDF and RDFa data) that we crawl through the BOSS API. See the official announcement and commentaries throughout the Web.

This means essentially opening up all public data available to SearchMonkey applications, and thus making it possible for anyone to experiment with various forms of semantic search that go well beyond changing the way abstracts look. Consider for example the microsearch prototype I blogged about a few months ago, which showed rich abstracts, plus temporal and geographic visualizations based on metadata. You can now build something like microsearch in a matter of hours, and in a highly scalable fashion. Last, but not least, the terms of the BOSS API allows you to monetize your search engine in any way you want.

So if you think you can build a better search engine through semantics, this is a great time to start! All we ask is to give us feedback on what you do, minimally by tagging your experiment with the tag ‘bossmashup’.

Matt Harding dancing at Yahoo!

This is so cool: Matt Harding has been dancing recently at Yahoo!. If you’ve never heard of Matt, an internet phenomenon, go check out wherethehellismatt.com.