The chorus of Chesney Hawkes‘ song goes “I am the one and only”, a huge pop hit with teenage girls in the 1990s, but what does that have to do with SemTech 2010?

I was in the exhibit space yesterday evening and there was so much really interesting stuff. I had some really great conversations. Talking about storage implementations with Franz and revelytix (and drinking their excellent margaritas), looking at vertical search with Semantifi and having a great discussion about scaling with the guys from Oracle.

A really useful exhibition of some great technology companies in the semweb space.

So why the Chesney reference? Well, several of the exhibitors started out with

we’re the only end-user semantic web application available today

and

we have the first foo bar baz server that does blah blah blah

and

we are the first and only semantic search widget linker

and all I could hear in my head every time it was said was Chesney… “You are the one and only” only they’re not.

For all of the exhibitors that said they were first or only I had serious doubts, having seen other things very similar. Maybe their ‘first’ was very specific — I was the first blogger at SemTech to write a summary of the first two days that included a reference to Colibri…

The problem with these statements is that they are damaging, how much depends on the listener. If the listener is new to the semweb and believe the claim then it makes our market look niche, immature and specialist. If the listener is informed and does not believe the claim it makes your business look like marketeers who will lie to impress people. Either way it’s not a positive outcome. Please stop.