I was reading a blog entry by Matt at PeerPressure that brings up a point worth sharing. One of the biggest problems supporters of the Semantic Web initially faced was, as Matt stated, the classic tech catch 22. His explanation is:

"no one wants to create content that can't be consumed, and no one wants to invest in tools to consume content that doesn't yet exist."

However, the problem of requiring an initial big bang to get the ball rolling has been relieved somewhat by the rise of standard markup patterns that don't force us to "repeat ourselves" such as Microformats and embedded RDF. These small building blocks are like baby steps towards the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web is gaining traction and more developers are placing interest in what it has to offer.