Sorry to be negative, but this is really old (2001 writeup). A lot of things have changed. For a good 'visual' example of semWeb in action, look at Reuter's openCalais project. Install the gnosis firefox plugin, and be amazed at the possibilities :0

Another good site to monitor is of course readwriteweb. They published recently an OPML file with good rss feeds to follow this movement. And for state-of-the art, see larkc.eu (disclaimer: I work on that project). larkc.eu aims to do semantic web reasoning at a scale never before seen (i.e., the entire web).