Keep Your Dirty Hands Of My Annotations!

After saying for years that annotation of webpages can't work because of SPAM or that the most interesting information is still in the text, Google announced yesterday a new service that allows to create labels for websites. Sadly (but not surprisingly) Google designed the service in a way that only Google will profit from the annotations: the annotations are described in simple text or xml files and uploaded to Google, no chance for other companies to also build services on top of this information (this would be different with a Semantic Web approach where the annotations would be as accessible as the websites are now).