The major complaint that I have about currently implementable semantic web technologies is the seemingly endless pit of complexity combined with the meager resulting functionality. You can spend literally days on end going learning XML vocabularies, starting with a general study of RDF, through the Ontology Swamps (OWL, DAML, DAML+OIL, OWL-S, SHOE, ... ) and then on to the specific vocabulary applications which are only now (slowly) gaining recognition. Some of the more useful ones that are showing up these days include: FOAF, DOAP, and RDDL.
ROR - Resources of a Resource is a new vocabulary, however, that is immediately implementable, and which strikes me as being nicely balanced between the general abstraction required to be useful in a range of use-cases, and the grounded specificity that allows it to be easily understood, implemented, and (hopefully) made use of in the real world. Refer to the ROR Specification for details, but in many cases the ROR metadata can (probably should) be automatically generated, and provides a clear first-cut at semantically mapping the available components of an online resource. In addition to an implementation template, the author provides a nifty browser-based ROR Explorer application, which highlights some basic examples of ROR metadata in action.
Of course the chicken and egg conundrum is still out there -- in order to be useful, a large number of sites must implement this technology, which won't be compelling until they do. However, this vocabulary seems both easy to use and easy to make substantial use of, and that, at least, is a big step in the right direction.
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