"The most cautious of the panelists, Rao seemed determined to deflate the hype bubble at every opportunity, declaring flat-out that he thought any VC would be foolish to invest in any Semantic Web business plans at this stage. Like all the panelists, he does believe it will ultimately be important, but thinks the current level of hype is grossly out of proportion to the reality (or unreality) of the technology infrastructure."

Gosh, I didn't realized how determined I was, but I guess this guy's right on target.  I do hate hype, especially on cool technologies.  To me cool is about useful.  It doesn't matter if it might take a while for everybody to see how useful.  I think there are short term and long term wins for things Semantic-Web-ish, especially some of the concrete protocol work, but many of underlying memes have been around for a while, ... that was true of the Web itself, so perhaps I'll be shamed shortly ... maybe I need to write a more useful position, then I might make Alan Wright's favorite list anyway.