Eric Miller, SW Activity Lead, certainly has his job cut out. While there are encouraging signs of a groundswell in support for RDF, it mostly has a bad name and reputation at the moment. So one of the first aims of SW advocates must be to promote understanding of what they're doing, at both low and high levels. There are reasons for using it. An aid and impetus to getting understanding is to get implementation.
Implementations can speak louder than a thousand specifications.
The growth in basic RDF tools over the last year has been very pleasing. These tools are starting to reach the level of maturity at which I would consider basing an application on one or two of them. We should be careful not to restrict SW technologies to just those explicit layers in Berners-Lee's idealized diagram . The beauty of XML is that it's in the perfect place to act as a bridge. Likewise, there are other semantic applications, such as Topic Maps, that are pure XML applications.