When I first started taking an interest in semantic web technologies, I sought out places with quality information and opinion. Too often I found there was no up-to-date 'directory' listing the thought leaders in the field. Many information outlets were associated with specific products rather than design principles or standards. That made the initial learning process painful.
For the first question in SemanticOverflow I'd like your thoughts on where the richest sources of impartial semantic web wisdom and background are to be found. Where should I go, if I'm a beginner, to best help me ascend the semantic web learning curve? What about if I've grokked the fundamentals and want to dig deeper? How do I become a semantic web ninja?
UPDATE
The following list shows the links provided so far.
For an in-depth primer, I recommend the book "Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist" by Allemang & Hendler. It explains the concepts well and has lots of practical examples.
For the RDF component of the semantic web, if you're looking to go in deeper, I've written two guides at http://www.rdfabout.com which I've been told are quite good. :-) The site also links to all of the relevant standards at the W3C.
(Sorry for two posts. SO only allows one link per post for new users....)
Choose a library written in your favorite language and read the source code, join their mailing list, start answering questions and make new interesting ones yourself, contribute patches and report bugs if you find one.
Forget about: trees, XML, don't hurt yourself with RDF/XML + XSLT and think "graphs".
Read the recommendations from W3C (no, not the one about RDF/XML).
"We Learn...
10% of what we read
20% of what we hear
30% of what we see
50% of what we see and hear
70% of what we discuss
80% of what we experience
95% of what we teach others."
-- William Glasser
So, in theory you should teach... but, please, no need to become a University professor (no offence!)... you can just share your experience. :-)
It provides daily, short articles about the Semantic Web and news from the Web 3.0 world - I have started at the very basic level - and have recently covered OWL Lite. Will announce SemanticOverflow today :D
At the moment the blog is dedicated for the Polish audience only, but I am looking for people interested in providing side by side articles in other languages as well.
For people on reddit, there is a semantic web-subreddit. We are a small group (~700 subscribers, started a year ago), but (I like to think that) the links are of decent quality.
I personally try to post links to the "less talking, more showing/coding" kind of articles, if that is your thing.