As I procrastinatefinish my slides for a talk on Semantic Search on the Public Web with Creative Commons at the 2006 Semantic Technology Conference (March 6-9, San Jose, California) I note that the closing keynote makes some pretty heady predictions:

Markets for semantic technology products and services will grow 10-fold from 2006 to 2010 to more than $50B worldwide. Near-term drivers include 2-10X gains in performance for information-intensive processes across a broad range of applications and domains. From 2010 to 2020 semantic technology markets will grow ten-fold again, fueling trillion-dollar world-wide economic expansions. Longer-term drivers are new capabilities for knowledge-intensive activities, tasks, and processes that will tap new sources of value, delivering performance gains up to 100-fold.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it with Giving it Away (for Fun and Profit), Business 2.0’s article claiming Creative Commons could be the key to a new multibillion-dollar industry. Ponder what would happen if you mashed up these nascent multibillion-dollar industries? Fortunately some of the forward thinkers who started Creative Commons already thought of that.

Creative Commons board member Hal Abelson and advisor Ben Adida will also be presenting at the conference on Interoperable Metadata for a Bottom-Up Semantic Web, as will CC advisor Eric Miller, on Recombinant Business, appropriately enough.

If this post gave you a hype headache please go listen to some chill. You’ll get over it.