The blog of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County's eBiquity research group, covering semantic web, security, machine learning, and programming topics.
HN links it for items like the Dr. Seuss halting problem proof and a 2007 post on how YouTube scales MySQL.
I have to admit, I haven't read TFA, and I'm not sure I want to. The Semantic Web has hardly failed - tons of people use the Semantic Web everyday and just don't know it. The thing is, the SW isn't necessarily meant to be something that the average end user knows about and uses explicitly. It's just about making it easier for machines to understand semantics around data on the web, so those machines can do a better job of helping the humans do whatever it is they are trying to do. So Google could be using the Semantic Web behind the scenes all day long, and the end user would never know it.
And yes, Google do use the Semantic Web.[1][3] So does Yahoo.[2][3] Etc.[3]
It doesn't matter that some people use RDFa, others use microdata, others use microformats, others use RDF/XML, others use JSON-LD or whatever. That's irrelevant syntactical details. The point is having explicitly defined semantics associated with things.
Anyway, the Semantic Web is becoming more and more important with every passing day. As tools[4] for automating the process of extracting rich semantics from unstructured data mature and become better and more widely available, the number of applications for explicit semantics is just going to mushroom.
Just to illustrate (and forgive me a bit of what might be seen as self-promotion here) - our Enterprise Social Network product, Quoddy, has Stanbol integration such that we can process all the various bits of "stuff" that flow through the system, do…
The author of this poem is actually the inventor of the Spanning Tree Protocol (which the poem describes): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radia_Perlman
P.S. For those who like nerdy poems, here's a poem which is a proof of the undecidability of the Halting Problem: http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2008/01/19/how-dr-suess-would-prove-the-halting-problem-undecidable
Definitely Google via Youtube uses mysql, at least.
From 2007: http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2007/12/28/how-youtube-scales-mysql-for-its-large-databases/
Undated job opening: http://www.google.com/intl/ln/jobs/uslocations/mountain-view/engops/opsit/youtube-mysql-database-administrator-mountain-view/index.html