How does this smart data get created? Definitely not by Joe User and Betty Blogger, unless Cory Doctrow is a million miles off base. The typical answer is good meta-metadata created by text indexing/mining software and lots of hand-crafted, application-specific taxonomies that help the text mining software do its work. The problem is that It will be very hard work to build useful taxonomies / ontologies even after the Semantic Web standards and tools are mature.
Also, my guess is that the big companies are not being either cunning or stupid in their non-enthusiasm for the Semantic Web; they're saying that the standards for smart data are the least of the problems here. Smart data won't come out of the box or out of Word or Blogger, it will be created by software that we don't really know how to build yet. Lots of thought and money are going into this problem, by Google, IBM, Microsoft (I'm sure), and a zillion startups.
