Linked Data is now officially on its way to the commercial world.  Google is creating the market incentive to drive it, one element at a time.

Google’s recent unveiling of google snippets and search options means its time to change how you display your products online.  Your products and any reviews of your products by customers will soon be found if you have displayed in one of several formats. The technical name for these are RDFa or one of several microformats.  Also using google, people can more easily look for reviews. Soon also they will be able to compare different products and extract specific information from your website using Google Squared.

What does this mean?  It is the beginning of a change in how the underlying code of websites is written.  It will mean that facts, social remarks  or other categories of information which the consumer deems is important will be more than keywords.  Keywords are not dead but they are now going to one element of the search equation rather than the only one.  Google will likely determine if people find well formatted information more useful and if they do, it is likely those sites will start to appear at the top of searches.

Of course this will not happen overnight but this announcement and the fact that yahoo already is doing similar with Search Monkey means the race to a Linked Data web of meaning has now started and will proceed in a step by step fashion probably based on what meaning the consumers are searching for.

But yes its time to change how your products are displayed online and time to start to reconsider social content in your website.  That is certain.