Some of us geeky types play with certain technologies just because they're fun and useful to us and to our friends in the little clubs that form around each technology. We debate about their potential use to a wider audience, and there's certainly been plenty of this debate about the semantic web.

When people who feel that there's money to make start sniffing around, it's an odd feeling; my only real experience at that was watching XML' s transition from a side project of some SGML geeks to a pillar technology of an economic bubble. The semantic web may never get that big (personally, I feel that as with Artificial Intelligence, useful and valuable technologies will spin off from it and become part of the plumbing while people continue to debate the "success" and "failure" of the blanket term), but people who see a market for it are starting to look into it.

Jupitermedia has been around for a while. They had the foresight to grab the domain names internet.com and graphics.com way back when, and I had heard their name in association with the devX.com tech news and features site and their conferences and trade shows. They're planning on a Semantic Web conference, and more importantly for now, they're looking to hire someone to cover the semantic web for them on a part-time basis. They want two or three articles a week of 400 – 500 words each. Pay would be based on the author's experience in semantic web-related work and his or her writing background. According to Gus Venditto of jupitermedia.com (gvenditto@), "What we expect is someone who will do the research—talking to people, following up on leads, reading the wires for the latest—and then write solid newsy articles." I'd do it, but my job keeps me busy enough.

It's a great opportunity for someone interested in evangelizing the semantic web to get paid to do so. Of course, to track potential story ideas, you'd want to point Planet RDF and some some digg, del.icio.us, blogpulse, and reddit feeds into a Yahoo pipe ... and the rest is left as an exercise for the writer.

If you're interested, get in touch with Gus.