Web Trends

Is YouTube the Next Google?

Kids no longer learn about the world by reading text. Like the television generation, they are absorbing the world through their visual sense. But there is a big difference. Television was programmed and inflexible. YouTube is completely micro-chunked and on demand. Kids can search for what they need anytime. This is different, and powerful.

True, the current model of YouTube is still raw and still skewed to entertainment. But imagine online video 5 years from now, geared to kids, where entertainment, games, education, travel -- everything for kids -- is mixed and delivered via searchable channels. This would be a big change on the Internet and in the world. Just as we no longer think twice about Googling, kids of the future will be consuming huge volumes of information via video.

Mobile Messaging Reaches Record-Breaking Numbers

Mobile messaging is experiencing a period of record growth, according to some figures released from VeriSign earlier this week. Looking at the numbers more closely, some interesting trends emerge. Those include the use of messaging for social and political change, marketing, such as that done by U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's mobile campaign, and the use of mobile messaging for charitable donations. Other sectors experiencing significant increases are the enterprise and financial institutions. In those two areas alone, mobile messaging has seen a 115% increase in only a year's time, and much of that is thanks to the financial industry's adoption of the medium for business to consumer communication.

Google Turning Search Into World's Biggest Wiki

Google put on a full court media push this week for a major change the company is making to its search experience - a new feature called Google Search Wiki will launch soon. The feature will allow logged-in users to change the order of search results and mark up search results pages with notes. Only their own results will be changed - unless they click a link to view all Search Wiki notes on a search's page.

Read the post for an explanation of what the feature will do and a reaction to the announcement from Ward Cunningham, the man who invented the wiki.

College Stops Giving Students New Email Accounts: Start Of New Trend?

Officials at Boston College have made what may be a momentous decision: they've stopped doling out new email accounts to incoming students. The officials realized that the students already had established digital identities by the time they entered college, so the new email addresses were just not being utilized. The college will offer forwarding services instead.

The A-Team

We like to report good news, not just because it makes us all feel good, but because when a company is doing something positive during a downturn, it indicates something pretty interesting about that company. That is why Jobwire reports on new hires when all the other news is about layoffs. In that same spirit, The A-Team will be a monthly wrap-up of all the Series A VC financing rounds in web technology. To close a Series A VC round these days, you have to be pretty special.

Read the full A-Team post for the Qualifying Rules.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

• VisualCV lets you stand out from the crowd when job-hunting.
• Mindmeister is an online mind mapping tool.
• WildApricot is Membership Management Software.
• Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
• Glue enables you to connect with friends while browsing.
• Strands provides real-time recommendations of products.
• Direct Media Exchange is a solution for managing ad networks.
• Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
• Quintura is a visual-based search engine.
• Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
• MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
• SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

RWW Jobwire

IRS Hires its First CTO

While the tech world eagerly waits to see who Barack Obama will appoint Chief Technology Officer of the United States, a similar appointment of more immediate impact to many people has just occurred. Terence Milholland began work this week as the first Chief Technology Officer in the history of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). He enters an IRS that the General Accounting Office said last week suffers from technology so outdated it leaves the agency with inadequate integrity, reliability and security for sensitive taxpayer information.

SUBSCRIBE TO READWRITEWEB'S JOBWIRE FOR THE LATEST NEWS ON JOB HIRES IN TECH

Web Products

10 Semantic Apps to Watch - One Year Later

In November 2007, we listed and reviewed 10 promising Semantic Web apps. A lot can happen in one year on the Internet, so we thought we'd check back in with each of the 10 products and see how they're progressing. What's changed over the past year and what are these companies working on now? The products are, in no particular order: Freebase, Powerset, Twine, AdaptiveBlue, Hakia, Talis, TrueKnowledge, TripIt, Calais (was ClearForest), Spock.

Later in the week we published a list of 10 more Semantic apps to watch.

Mozilla: One Billion Addons Served - Here Are Some of Our Favorites

Mozilla announced this week that it has served its 1 billionth addon download since they started keeping track of these downloads in 2005. Currently, Mozilla's users are downloading close to 1.5 million addons every day. Mozilla has cultivated one of the most active and interesting developer communities around its products and seeing numbers like these will surely give a lot of other developers an incentive to try their hands at developing new plugins for Firefox as well. In the post we list some of our favorite addons, as well as favorites of our community.

Amazon CloudFront: Outlook for CDN Is Cloudy (and That's Good)

Two months ago, Amazon - which has taken to sharing some of its massive computing power with mere mortals as a means of developing additional revenue streams - announced that they were developing a content-delivery network (CDN) to complement their existing Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) offering. This week, they unveiled the beta version of that service, named Amazon CloudFront. Boasting a now-familiar, pay-as-you-go pricing model, Amazon CloudFront promises to make CDN an affordable addition for any site looking to gain more efficient content delivery.

Boxee Raises $4 Million for Open-Source Media Center

These are clearly not the easiest times to secure financing for a startup, but Boxee, which makes an open-source media center application that works on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and the Apple TV, just announced a $4 million investment from Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. Bijan Sabet from Spark and Fred Wilson from Union Square will join the Boxee board. Boxee, which is still in private beta testing, is a media center solution that allows you to play back content from third-party providers like Hulu, CBS, Comedy Central, or Last.fm through a very slick interface.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

RWW Enterprise Channel

Report: Millennials Will Route Around IT Departments

According to a new report by Accenture, a large number of Millennials (those born between 1977 and 1997), expect their companies to accommodate their IT preferences, including their preferred computers and applications. More than a third of Millennials also indicated that they were dissatisfied with the technologies their employers currently provide.

Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel.

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Now we're going to list 10 more Semantic apps to watch. These are all apps that have gotten onto our radar over 2008. We've reviewed all but one of them, so click through to the individual reviews for more detail. It should go without saying, but this is by no means an exhaustive list - so if we haven't mentioned your favorite, please add it in the comments.

BooRah is a restaurant review site that we first reviewed earlier this year. One of BooRah's most interesting aspects is that it uses semantic analysis and natural language processing to aggregate reviews from food blogs. Because of this, BooRah can recognize praise and criticism in these reviews and then rates restaurants accordingly. BooRah also gathers reviews from Citysearch, Tripadvisor and other large review sites.

BooRah also announced last month the availability of an API that will allow other web sites and businesses to offer online reviews and ratings from BooRah to their customers. The API will surface most of BooRah's data about a given restaurant, including ratings, menus, discounts, and coupons.

Swotti

Swotti is a semantic search engine that aggregates opinions about products to help you make purchasing decisions. We reviewed the product back in March. Swotti aggregates opinions about products from product review sites, forums and discussion boards, web sites and blogs, and then categorizes those reviews as to what feature or aspect of the product is being reviewed, tagging it accordingly, and then rating the review on as positive or negative.

Dapper MashupAds

Earlier this month we wrote about the recent improvement in Dapper MashupAds, a product we first spotted over a year ago. The idea is that publishers can tell Dapper: this is the place on my web page where the title of a movie will appear, now serve up a banner ad that's related to whatever movie this page happens to be about. That could be movies, books, travel destinations - anything. We remarked that the UI for this has grown much more sophisticated in the past year.

How this works: in the back end, Dapper will be analyzing the fields that publishers identify and will apply a layer of semantic classification on top of them. The company believes that its new ad network will provide monetary incentive for publishers to have their websites marked up semantically. Dapper also has a product called Semantify, for SEO - see our review of that.

For more on Semantic advertising, see our write-up of a panel on this topic from the Web 3.0 Conference.

Inform.com

Inform.com analyzes content from online publishers and inserts links from a publisher's own content archives, affiliated sites, or the web at large, to augment content being published. We reviewed it in January, when at the time the company had more than 100 clients - including CNN.com, WashingtonPost.com and the Economist.

Inform says its technology determines the semantic meaning of key words in millions of news stories around the web every day in order to recommend related content. The theory is that by automating the process of relevant link discovery and inclusion, Inform can easily add substantial value to a publisher's content. Inform also builds out automatic topic pages, something you can see around WashingtonPost and CNN.com.

Siri

We have met our share of secretive startups over the years, but few have been as secretive about their plans as Siri, which was founded in December 2007 and did not even have an official name until October this year. Siri was spun out of SRI International and its core technology is based on the highly ambitious CALO artificial intelligence project.

In our October post on Siri, we discovered that Siri is working on a "personalized assistant that learns." We expect Siri to have a strong information management aspect, combined with some novel interface ideas. Based on our discussion with founders Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer in October, we think that there will be a strong mobile aspect to Siri's product and at least some emphasis on location awareness. Siri plans to launch in the first half of 2009.

Evri

Evri is a Paul Allen (of Microsoft fame) backed semantic search engine that launched into a limited beta in June. Evri is a search engine, though it adds a very sophisticated semantic layer on top of its results that emphasizes the relationships between different search terms. It especially prides itself for having developed a system that can distinguish between grammatical objects such subjects, verbs, and objects to create these connections. You can check out a tour of Evri here.

UpTake

Semantic search startup UpTake (formerly Kango) aims to make the process of booking travel online easier. In our review in May, we explained that UpTake is a vertical search engine that has assembled what it says is the largest database of US hotels and activities - over 400,000 of them - from more than 1,000 different travel sites. Using a top-down approach, UpTake looks at its database of over 20 million reviews, opinions, and descriptions of hotels and activities in the US and semantically extracts information about those destinations.

Imindi

Imindi is essentially a mind mapping tool, although it markets itself as a "Thought Engine". Imindi was recommended to us in the comments to our previous post by Yihong Ding, who called it "an untraditional Semantic Web service". Yihong said that traditionally Semantic Web services employ machines to understand humans, however Imindi's approach is to encourage humans to better understand each other via machines.

Imindi has met with a fair amount of skepticism so far - and indeed it appears to be reaching big with its AI associations. However we think it's worth watching, if for no other reason than to see if it can live up to the description on its About page: "By capturing the free form associations of user's logic and intuition, IMINDI is building a global mind index which is an entirely new resource for building collective intelligence and leveraging human creativity and subjectivity on the web."

See also: Thinkbase: Mapping the World's Brain

Juice

We've all been there. You started reading something on the Web, saw something interesting in the article, searched for it, wound up somewhere else, and after about 12 hops you've forgotten exactly what it was you were looking for. If only there were some way to select that topic midstream and have the information automagically appear for you, without disrupting your workflow or sending you traipsing off into the wilds of the Web.

If that sounds familiar, you may need a shot of Juice, a new Firefox 3 add-in currently in public beta from Linkool Labs, that makes researching Web content as easy as click-and-drag. In our review of Juice, we concluded that it avoids some of the more traditional stumbling blocks of Semantic apps by taking a very top-down approach focused on a distinct data set.

Faviki

Faviki is a new social bookmarking tool which we reviewed back in May. It offers something that services like Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us and Diigo do not - semantic tagging capabilities. What this means is that instead of having users haphazardly entering in tags to describe the links they save, Faviki will suggest tags to be used instead. However, unlike other services, Faviki's suggestions don't just come from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted straight out of the Wikipedia database.

Because Faviki uses structured tagging, there is more that can be learned about a particular tag, its properties, and its connections to other tags. The system will automatically know what tags belong together and how they relate to others.

Conclusion

The Semantic Web continues to inch closer to reality, by being used in products such as BooRah, Inform.com and Juice. Let us know your thoughts on the above 10 products, and of course any that we missed this time round.

In our next post in this series, we're going to publish a completely new list of Semantic apps to watch! That's right, 10 more Semantic apps. Let us know your suggestions in the comments.

Freebase is an open, semantically marked up database of information. It looks similar to Wikipedia, but Freebase is all about structured data and what you can do with it.

Freebase has been one of the more hyped companies in Semantic Web, leading to some skepticism that the product is too much like Wikipedia and offers nothing much new. In May '08, we attempted to dispel the Freebase skepticism. Our conclusion was that the structured database, API, creative commons licensing - among other things - all added up to a richer product than Wikipedia. Then in July, we reported that Freebase was about to hit 4 million topics in its collection - which at the time was 60% more than the English Wikipedia.

However, we noted some concerns with Freebase - "big gaps in the data" along with usability issues. In a follow-up article in August, we covered an interesting tool for browsing Freebase, called Freebase Parallax. Unfortunately, when we tried out a number of searches in Parallax, very few subjects were well populated.

RWW verdict one year later: still lots of work to do for Freebase, in terms of usability and useful data.

Calais (was ClearForest)

When we did our round-up one year ago, ClearForest had been recently acquired by Reuters and at that point it had a Web Service and a Firefox extension. What a change a year brings! ClearForest went on to release Calais, a toolkit of products that enable users to incorporate semantic functionality within their blog, content management system, website or application.

Since launching the Open Calais API early this year, over 6,000 developers have registered with it and the service is doing more than 1 million transactions a day. We wrote about the launch of Calais' easiest-to-use service yet, called SemanticProxy, at the end of September. Version 3.0 was released earlier this month and version 4 is expected by January 09.

RWW verdict one year later: Calais has really blossomed over the past year and it is one of the most promising Semantic services around today. We can't wait to see what's next!

Powerset

Powerset (see our initial coverage here and here) is a natural language search engine. It's fair to say that Powerset has had a great 2008, having been acquired by Microsoft in July this year.

At the time of the acquisition, Powerset said that it needed a bigger partner to expand its product beyond its current state of only searching Wikipedia - something we had speculated about when the rumors of the acquisition first appeared. In its own statement, Microsoft stressed how useful Powerset's technology will be for improving Microsoft's own search products and to "take Search to the next level." In our analysis of the deal, we noted that it was a "bold play requiring exact execution" by Microsoft. We thought it was doubtful that Microsoft bought the company just to enhance Live Search - although in September Microsoft did just that. Possibly the plan is to replicate the Wikipedia solution, then incorporate Powerset into Internet Explorer.

RWW verdict one year later: successful acquisition for Powerset, bold one for the acquirer Microsoft. Can't wait to see what Microsoft does with it!

Twine

Definitely one of the more controversial of the Semantic apps we've covered on ReadWriteWeb. At launch last year, Twine claimed to be the first mainstream Semantic Web app. The company's founder Nova Spivack hasn't been shy to talk the product up even more over the past year. Version 1.0 of Twine was launched late October. At that time Spivack told us that Twine had 500,000 unique visitors in its closed beta, of which 50,000 are currently "active" (a user who visits the Twine site at least once per month). There were 20,000 'twines' at that point, with 1 million pieces of content having been added to the system.

Those statistics are OK for a relatively young beta, however Twine has also been beset by usability and performance issues in its beta period. In March we summed it up with a post entitled: Twine Disappoints After Semantic Web Hype.

RWW verdict one year later: still far from mainstream and reviews have been disappointing user experience has been an issue over the past year. Struggling to find its niche.

Update: Some people have pointed out in comments and via email that many reviews of Twine have been positive. We agree and so we've struck out that line and clarified our position - that user experience has been the main issue.

Hakia

Hakia is a search engine focusing on natural language processing methods to try and deliver 'meaningful' search results. Hakia attempts to analyze the concept of a search query, in particular by doing sentence analysis. Over the past year Hakia has been busy extending its reach - licensing its proprietary OntoSem technology to other companies in March and announcing a Semantic API in June. It also released a social network of sorts, called h-Club.

RWW verdict one year later: Hakia has made good progress getting its technology into the hands of third parties. It's a steep challenge taking on Google though.

TripIt

Tripit is an app that manages your travel planning. With TripIt, you forward incoming bookings to plans@tripit.com and the system manages the rest.

Over the past year TripIt has continued to iterate on its feature set - introducing LinkedIn integration, better mobile functionality, more social networking features, and other goodies.

RWW verdict one year later: TripIt is one of those apps that amazes people when they first use it. Its challenge now is to grab a foothold among mainstream users.

AdaptiveBlue

Disclosure: AdaptiveBlue is a current RWW sponsor and its founder Alex Iskold is a feature writer at RWW.

AdaptiveBlue are makers of the Firefox plugin, BlueOrganizer. As we wrote in January this year, the basic idea behind BlueOrganizer is that it gives you added information about webpages you visit and offers useful links based on the subject matter.

Over the past year the company has been working on a new product, called Glue. Launched last month, Glue is a more social networking oriented version of BlueOrganizer - it connects you to your friends based around things like books, music, movies, stars, artists, stocks, wine, restaurants, and more.

RWW verdict one year later: the company has diversified smartly, but its challenge is to go beyond the 'cool factor' and get more people using the products repeatedly.

TrueKnowledge

When we covered UK semantic search engine TrueKnowledge last year, it was just after it had unveiled a demo of its private beta. Back then it reminded us of the also unlaunched (at that time) Powerset, but it was also reminiscent of Ask.com "smart answers". TrueKnowledge combines natural language analysis, an internal knowledge base and external databases to offer immediate answers to various questions.

One year later, TrueKnowledge is still in private beta - and this author got an error message when I submitted my email to apply to get into the beta. However there are signs of public life in the company blog, which is fairly active. Also the company launched a beta app this month, called Quiz Bot - a natural language search service that likely "won't be able to answer your question, but by asking us you are helping improve the service."

RWW verdict one year later: The jury is still out. It looks like a public beta is still some way off, which puts pressure on it to be extremely good when it eventually does launch.

Talis

Talis is a 40-year old UK software company which has created a semantic web application platform. Over the past year, Talis has continued to make a name for itself as an evangelist for the Semantic Web, most notably through the blogging and podcasting activities of Paul Miller. Talis also produces a great magazine for Semantic Web, called Nodalities, and has an active company blog under the same name. As for the company's products, the platform seems to be iterating nicely and is being used in niche library and government applications.

RWW verdict one year later: Talis has successfully positioned itself as an authority on Semantic Web in the blogosphere, which we love because it's a great way to keep track of Semantic Web trends!

Spock

Spock is a people search engine that got a lot of buzz when it launched. Alex Iskold went so far as to call it "one of the best vertical semantic search engines built so far."

So how has it fared over the past year? Apparently its traffic has been very good. However, as Sarah Perez recently wrote on this blog, the "excitement has worn off." Instead of searching for people on Spock or other similar people search engines, wrote Sarah, most users simply turn to old standbys like Facebook or LinkedIn. To get their mojo back again (and no doubt some money in the bank), Spock has plans to launch a new subscriber-only service in January. It will be full-on public record search tool, which people can subscribe to for $1.99 per month.

RWW verdict one year later: despite claims of great traffic growth, it's clear that Spock as a consumer search engine hasn't quite panned out. Can it re-invent itself as a subscription-based specialist service? Check back in another year.

Conclusion

We're pleased to see that all 10 of the products we profiled one year ago are still very much alive and kicking. One had a great acquisition result (Powerset), at least one has grown into a thriving developer ecosystem (Calais), some are experimenting with new services (AdaptiveBlue, Spock, Hakia), some are continuing to pump out new features and/or apps (TripIt, Talis). However, it's also clear that some are still trying to find their feet (Freebase, Twine, TrueKnowledge).

In our next post in this series, we'll profile 10 more Semantic Apps to watch! Please tell us in the comments which ones have caught your eye recently.

What's Glue?

Glue is a new browser plugin from Adaptive Blue. It uses semantic technology to connect you to your friends around things like books, music, movies, stars, artists, stocks, wine, restaurants, and more. The plugin places a bar - not a toolbar, just a bar - at the top of your browser window when you visit certain popular web sites like Amazon, Yahoo! Finance, Wine.com, IMDB, Wikipedia, Citysearch, Last.fm, and many others.

As you read about the album, movie, book, or whatever else it is that you're viewing at the time, you'll have a toolbar at the top of the page where you can see which of your friends had visited the same page, if they liked it, and if they left a comment.

Glue Is Not Co-browsing

Glue is not a co-browsing plugin like Me.dium nor does it try to socialize the entire web surfing experience like Socialbrowse (our coverage). Also, unlike Headup, another semantic browser plugin we covered recently, Glue doesn't bother you with pop-up messages as you surf. Glue simply provides a social element to web pages in context - there's no destination site to join and your social graph doesn't need to be re-created in order to use it.

How It Works

In order to tap into your network of friends, Glue uses APIs from popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed to import your friends. You can choose to import one or all of those friend lists into the plugin.

To participate in the Glue network, all you do is continue browsing the web normally. When you visit a supported site, the Glue friend bar appears. If you choose, you can view what your friends say about the item on the page, or you can ignore the bar and continue on your way. However, your visit is recorded and when one of your friends visits that same page, they can see that you've been there recently, though not the exact date or time your visit occurred. This information is only stored for the last 20 things you've visited on the web.

While surfing, if you want to share your thoughts about the item you're viewing, you can optionally use the Glue "like" button and/or the "2 cents" button which lets you add a quick thought about item. You can also click on the bar to see the profiles of your friends, other recent Glue users, and you can explore their interests even further by clicking into their profiles, which display in a pop-up box that appears when you click their avatar. You can also optionally click on "Actions" to explore the item you're viewing on other Glue-supported sites.

Making The Social Web Relevant

By providing this social experience in context, Glue can actually be more useful to you than simply joining isolated social networks surrounding your interests where your data and that of your friends is trapped inside the network's walls. It may also have some appeal over a lifestreaming service like FriendFeed, because you don't have to happen across the information - it's there when you're actively interested in something and have sought it out on the web.

In the official version coming soon, the company is also soon going to provide a method for any web publisher to "Glue-enable" their site by simply adding AB Meta to their sites, by inserting three lines of code in the header of a page.

Glue is the next generation of the Adaptive Blue plugin, a tool that currently has around 350,000 active users. Current Adaptive Blue users will find their plugin updated to Glue through the standard Firefox plugin update process. For everyone else, you can download the plugin here.

Although at the present time Glue is available as a Firefox plugin only, an IE version is in the works and an iPhone plugin will arrive in a few weeks.

Disclosure: AdaptiveBlue's CEO, Alex Iskold, is a feature writer for RWW.]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/put_the_social_web_in_context_with_glue.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/put_the_social_web_in_context_with_glue.php Products Tue, 28 Oct 2008 12:00:00 -0800 Sarah Perez Semantinet today announced the launch of its first product, headup.com. Headup is a browser extension that cross-references data from all your social networks, including Twitter, Gmail, Facebook, Last.fm, Digg, and FriendFeed. Headup integrates directly into these sites and allows you to quickly get more information about your friends' activities on other networks. The extension only works in Firefox and is based on Silverlight 2, which Microsoft just released this week.

Semantinet provided us with 400 invites for our readers. You can find more details about how to claim yours at the end of this post.

Depending on Silverlight might seem like a risky move at first, but a fresh install of Silverlight takes less than 10 seconds and Semantinet argues that it decided to use Siverlight instead of Flash because of its better privacy controls and in order to achieve its design goals.

How Does it Work?

Headup's mission is to connect you with your friends' activities across different social networks and to learn about your likes and dislikes so that it can make recommendations for you. Headup will add little icons to items it recognizes, which can be names, songs, videos, etc.

You activate headup by clicking on these icons. If a friend likes a particular song on Last.fm, for example, it will give you the option to play the song in the headup window, see when the band will play in your town, and what your friends thought about the song. If headup recognizes a person, the pop-up will also give you information about their latest Twitter updates, or Last.fm plays.

After the install, headup already works without having you having to set anything up, but once you import your contacts, it will go out and look at your personal connections from Twitter, FriendFeed, or Gmail.

Headup can also make use of Yahoo's Fire Eagle geolocation service to provide you with relevant local information. Headup will also make a limited set of recommendations, though this is not the focus of the product. After it recognizes your tastes, for example, it can recommend YouTube videos you might like.

Headup smartly stays out of the way when you don't want to use it. Overall, headup is a very useful little tool and it will only get more powerful as Semantinet connect it to more services.

Invites

If you want to try headup yourself, head over to the beta sign-up page and use 'RWWCODE' as your invite code. Once you tried it out, feel free to let us know your thoughts about it in the comments.

SemantiNet Introducing: headup from SemantiNet Ltd on Vimeo

You can download the Executive Summary here. We got a look at the whole report and it is packed full of great data, including the two top 10 lists of Semantic Web opportunities detailed below.

Also in this post we're giving away 3 free tickets to Defrag for the best suggestions in the comments for 'web 3.0' apps. See below for more details.

Top-10 List -- Enterprise
1 Information sharing
2 Semantic search, discovery, & navigation
3 Semantic mashups and composite applications
4 Semantic infrastructure / middleware SSOA, SBPM, SWS, virtualization, policy-based computing
5 Semantic business intelligence
6 Semantic ERP applications CRM, PLM, SCM, HRM
7 Semantic governance, compliance, & risk
8 Semantic web sites, wikis, collaboration, interest networking, & collective knowledge systems
9 Semantic advertising, marketing, personalization, & customization
10 Intelligent systems knowledge-based research, design, engineering, simulation, planning, scheduling, optimization, & decision support.

Win a Ticket to Defrag

Totally unrelated to Project10X's report, but we just happen to have 3 tickets to the Defrag conference in Denver Nov 3-4 to give away. To win one, simply leave a comment in this post detailing what kind of 'Web 3.0' app you wish to see developed. You can use the above top 10 lists as inspiration, or wing it ;-)

The best 3 as chosen by our editors will win a full ticket to Defrag.

UPDATE: Thanks everyone for the great comments. The 3 winners of the Defrag passes are:

Scott Brinker
Jesse Wilkins
Edward Benson

What We Know

We tried our best to get some information from the tight-lipped co-founders, but we were only able to get a few details out of Dag and Adam:

• Consumer play: Siri is working on commercializing the results of the SRI-led CALO project. This project was part of a DARPA program call PAL. The goal of this project was to synthesize the current state of artificial intelligence research and to develop a "personalized assistant that learns."
• Goal: Siri wants to change the 'personal interaction paradigm' for the internet. Tom Gruber has talked about the need for this at length during a talk at SemTech 2008 earlier this year. In this talk, Gruber focuses on bringing 'intelligence to the interface' and creating products that are personalized and context-aware. Judging from this and the work of the CALO project, we expect Siri to have a strong information management aspect, combined with some novel interface ideas.
• Mobile: Based on our discussion with Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, we think that there will be a strong mobile aspect to Siri's product and at least some emphasis on location awareness. Siri's beta signup page seems to confirm this suspicion.
• Partners: Siri currently has 12 hardware and software partners, all of which would be "names you already know."
• Launch: Siri is planning to release a public version of its product in the first half of 2009.

What Will Siri Do?

For now, that's all we know, but feel free to speculate about Siri's product in the comments. You can also sign up for Siri's public beta here.

In the latest issue of Nodalities, a magazine about the Semantic Web by UK company Talis, there is an article by Talis CTO Ian Davis about the state of Semantic Web applications. Davis says that we're still in "Generation Zero" of the Semantic Web, because there are relatively few compelling apps. Specifically he notes that "there are still only a handful of applications that incorporate RDF at their heart and none of these are using the full potential of the Semantic Web." RDF is the Semantic Web's equivalent of the Web's HTML - its chief characteristic is the ability to ascribe meaning to data.

These can all be considered to be 'bottom up' Semantic Web apps. But most Semantic Apps today appear to be 'top down'.

Bottom Up vs Top Down

To understand the difference let's return to a classic RWW post by Alex Iskold, who wrote a primer on this topic called Top-Down: A New Approach to the Semantic Web. In that post, Alex Iskold explained that there are two main approaches to Semantic Apps:

1) Bottom Up - involves embedding semantical annotations (meta-data) right into the data. This is the version that uses RDF extensively.
2) Top down - relies on analyzing existing information; the ultimate top-down solution would be a fully blown natural language processor, which is able to understand text like people do. This rarely uses RDF, because it is seen as too complicated.

Plenty of Semantic Apps - But Most Sans RDF

We've noted a lot of 'top down' Semantic Apps in recent times. We profiled 10 of them back in November, including Freebase, Powerset, hakia, AdaptiveBlue, TripIt and more.

Startup conferences DEMO and TechCrunch50 both had a raft of Semantic startups vying for attention recently - for example see our review of SemantiFind. We've also seen some great advances this year from big companies. Thomson Reuters has been active with its OpenCalais initiative - its latest product SemanticProxy aims to give developers an easier way to extract semantic data from any web site. [Disclosure: OpenCalais is a RWW sponsor] And Yahoo, despite its ongoing struggles, has been showing excellent initative in Semantic Web with products like SearchMonkey - an open developer platform for search.

Talis' Paul Miller, who runs an excellent ZDNet blog about the Semantic Web, recently referred to a report by David Provost entitled On the cusp: a global review of the Semantic Web industry (PDF). Provost lists 17 apps, only a handful of which mentioned RDF.

It should be noted that Yahoo SearchMonkey does use at least a bit of RDF - RDFa and eRDF according to Provost's report. As Alex Iskold explained in his SearchMonkey analysis, these are variations of RDF:

"In 2005, Ian Davis, CTO of Semantic Web infrastructure company Talis, proposed eRDF - a form of RDF that can be embedded into HTML (compatible with HTML4). There is a simple mapping from eRDF to RDF so you can use any RDF/OWL vocabulary. But eRDF is not full RDF -- it has limitations. For example, there are no data types and there no blank nodes. Also, each page can only "talk" about itself and not about other pages.

Finally, the W3C published RDFa the latest embedding of RDF in XHTML, which has full RDF support. RDFa adds complexity in terms of implementation, but at the moment, gives the best way to embed RDF into HTML."

So, Where Are The Commercial RDF Apps?

The title of this post is a genuine question, because this author at least doesn't know the full answer. We know that Twine, Talis, Garlik and some others use RDF. But where are the other examples? In March, Alex suggested that RDF would be useful in places where interoperability is needed - for example the health community and in enterprises. Let us know in the comments if you know of examples in any of consumer, enterprise, health, or other markets.

Finally, dare we pose this controversial question: has the 'top down' Semantic Web "won" and we'll continue to see far more non-RDF apps in the commercial wild but relatively few RDF ones? Tim Berners-Lee and many other Semantic Web proponents will say a resounding 'no' to that. And ok, it will never be that black and white. But let us know your thoughts on whether RDF will become common place in the commercial world any time soon.

Related RWW posts on Semantic Web:

• 11 Things To Know About Semantic Web
• Semantic Web: Difficulties with the Classic Approach
• Top-Down: A New Approach to the Semantic Web
• Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies

Flickr images: ianloic and Peter Morville

For a news story, for example, SemanticProxy will identify politicians, cities, countries, etc. that are mentioned in the article. Once parsed, the service returns the semantic metadata of the page in three possible formats: RDF, MicroFormats, or standard HTML.

As the name implies, SemanticProxy acts as a proxy and aggressively caches all its data, which should make it easy for a developer to scale a project that relies on this service.

Catalyst

SemanticProxy is part of Reuters' attempt to jump-start the semantic web. As Tom Tague, the leader of the Calais initiative at Reuters, points out, SemanticProxy can hopefully act as a catalyst and get more developers to look at semantic data, which, in return, will give more developers a reason to publish this data themselves.

Disclosure: Calais is a RWW sponsor

The problem with spreadsheets that their system is trying to address has to do with those who need to derive data from multiple spreadsheets (two or more). Although it's easy enough to perform sorts, build macros, and create formulas within one spreadsheet, when needing to compare values in multiple spreadsheets the process becomes more difficult.

The company's app, The Semantic Discovery System for Excel, or just SDS for short, will look for similar columns or rows between the sheets and then "semantically" connects them. They don't appear to just be throwing that term around either - the app uses the same W3C Semantic Web technologies (RDF, OWL, SPARQL) to help you capture "meaning, intelligence, and knowledge" from the data saved in your spreadsheets.

Do We Need Semantic Desktop Apps?

Does SDS solve a business problem that is not yet being addressed through current technologies? In my experience, the short answer to this question is "no." (But wait, there's more...)

Typically, when a business has need of comparing and analyzing large amounts of data, the solution is to turn to a database product that can then be queried and from which custom reports can be pulled. And a business doesn't need to spend a lot of money on a robust solution to do so - even a smaller business can create a database by using inexpensive desktop software.

However, the difference between using a database technology and "semantically connecting" some spreadsheets comes down to for whom this product is being built. In the past, databases and other business intelligence apps were built as if the creators knew that the only person using them would be an I.T. guy or gal. SDS, instead, aims to satisfy the needs of the non-technical end user.

Is this another example of tech populism at work? It certainly looks like it. Yet, in this case their market is small - a non-technical user who's also a power user with Excel? There's usually some overlap there. Not to mention, by the time you've achieved "power user" status, you've often also figured out how to do more complicated things in Excel...like, say, formulas that work across spreadsheets, for example - the very pain points this app is trying to address.

Still, it's an interesting concept to think of taking the semantic web capabilities and integrating them into everyday programs to add a layer of intelligence to these programs as well. Done correctly, it could improve the capabilities of our favorite software apps without making the programs overly complex, which is what typically happens when you add more features.

What do you think? Is the Semantic Desktop (that is, semantically-enabled desktop apps) right around the corner? Or is this product and those like it too niche to find an audience? Let us know what you think in the comments.

All of these algorithms are running on a scalable, distributed grid, powered by Amazon Web Services. After meeting with Tori, we instantly knew why Zemanta won a Red Herring 100 award this year in Europe - not only are Tori and his team doing some amazing work, there is a wonderful story and passion behind the company.

RWW: What is your background?

Andraz Tori: I started programming at age of 10 and have been successful at international programming competitions in high school. I went to study computer science, however always did some things in parallel. For example, I had a 5-year detour as TV host on Slovenian national television and established a successful computer center in Ljubljana. I always look for how to improve life with technology and decided to go entrepreneurial when seeing an interesting opportunity on how to do it on a large scale.

What is it like to be a tech startup in Europe?

It's fun. It's hard. But that is even more rewarding when you overcome the challenges. Seedcamp (a UK competition inspired by Y Combinator) was a great boost for European early stage ventures and for us too. It is fun trying to bring a startup culture to Slovenia, a country that is not really used to it.

How did Zemanta get started?

We've seen that local TV house was providing all their video production on the Internet. Naturally Google could not understand and index them. We discovered that TV house had subtitles for all the shows and wrote a program to automatically create web pages that are automatically indexed and then point people to the right videos. That was too easy so we added a bunch of natural language processing and automatically connected those pages to other stories on TV portal and to Wikipedia. Now full blown web pages were created automagically. We sold this solution for pocket change and then realized that it is actually a very unique product - like nothing else out there! Then we (with co-founder Bostjan Spetic) realized that this amazing technology works on the language that only two million people speak. So we decided to go international and applied to Seedcamp. There we got first seed funding and later proper seed round from UK investors.

What is the main idea behind Zemanta?

When dealing with secretary, do you instruct her how to do every single detail or do you tell her approximately what you want, wait for result and just correct it if there are any the mistakes? We use computers today in the first way, while at Zemanta we believe it should be more of the second. Zemanta applies that idea to content creation. When author writes initial text, the service analyzes it and suggests how it can be improved.

Right now it suggests images to add, related articles, tags and in-text links. All this unobtrusively and implemented via slick interface. The better the computer understands the text and its context, the more it can help you write it. That's the idea behind Zemanta. Right now we are applying it to bloggers (via plug-ins for Firefox and Internet Explorer so they work even on hosted platforms) and we also are planning to open up an API.

How does your product use semantic technologies?

When doing our analysis we need to connect pieces of text to their semantic meaning. When suggesting tags we need to know their semantic neighborhood. But all this stays in background, the user never sees the magical semantic hand which is hidden behind simple and slick user interface. Because we find out what parts of text are about, we are able to create correct semantic markup that helps pages to get better visibility in semantic search engines or applications such as Yahoo! SearchMonkey.

What is Zemanta's architecture and use of Amazon Web Services?

Deep processing of text is a processor intensive task. You need to make it scalable, AWS EC2 is the right answer. We created our own high-availability high-performance solution that makes sure service is kept alive and well. All existing solutions only map well to classical web server + SQL server combination. We also use S3 for backups and some SimpleDB. AWS (and similar services) make life easier for startups. However you need to design your systems to be 'cloudable' from the start.

What are your goals for the rest of 2008 and beyond?

Simple, be the best utility service for bloggers in 2008. Get bloggers on board so they tell us what they want from the 'smart' service. Then provide more functionality and benefits from using Zemanta and provide an API to early adopters that want to integrate it in their own CMS or other types of applications.

Beyond 2008, we envision suggestion service so helpful that the experience becomes ubiquitously expected. In a few years you will want it whenever you will create content - be it writing a blog post, or using word processor or even in your email client. Users are going to expect computers to understand their intentions better. And help with good, insightful, directly usable suggestions. Zemanta is going to provide that service to large many of them via different delivery methods.

What companies are competing with you in the space? What other Semantic Web companies do you find interesting?

You could create Zemanta experience if you pulled different companies' products together. But we are the only one having a rounded product, not just API and not just one or two types of suggestions. You could find parts of Zemanta experience in Sphere, Calais, BlogRovr, Watson, etc.

I am a big fan of Cyc and Metaweb and hope people will build wonders on the foundations those two companies are building. I am also interested in Powerset and Twine which both could become very important if/when they make it into the mainstream.

What is one insight, business or technical, that you want to share with our readers?

Developing diverse skills pays off. And doing things with your whole heart always means an interesting journey, even when you end up at different place than you initially expected.

Tejit CEO Indus Khaitan began developing Tejit in 2007 as a personal project when he became frustrated reading duplicate content from the 1000+ blogs he had bookmarked. Since then, Tejit has expanded its analysis capabilities across millions of blogs. Tejit's semantic-analysis engine uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and semantic matching technology to identify topics, sentiments and entities present in web content.

A Flawed Tradition

According to SezWho CEO, Jitendra Gupta,

The traditional method of content discovery based on the similarity of content is not adequate for connecting conversation across social sites in a meaningful way. A new level of context-sensitive, semantic discovery is required to reflect all the layers of users' participation across the social web, and to track their contributions in a way that is universally relevant both within and across communities.

There's no doubt that the traditional rating system for comments has its flaws. In a post titled "Disqus Clout: Fail!", Phil Glockner of Scribkin points out one of the biggest flaws of comment rating systems using Disqus as an example. In the comments section, Louis Gray sums up the problem nicely:

I would expect it rewards those who comment most frequently, and wouldn't be so much a subjective view.

More Than Just A Rating System

Instead of replacing your comment system, SezWho aims to augment the conversations. Keeping the aforementioned flaw in mind, SezWho considers two important factors that: distributed conversations and the people behind them. SezWho provides a meta network information around participants and context. The context has information from various platforms to allow data and content to reside within the community. The service captures valuable information about the history and expertise of individual contributors. Community ratings are only a portion of the cumulative rankings for an overall score.

SezWho provided us with a comparison chart to better demonstrate the differences between what SezWho offers versus competitors Disqus and Intense Debate, which we've previously reviewed.

Adding Noise or Resolving Issues?

With all that SezWho adds, it can be argued that some of it will amount to more noise for users. While, we've previously used SezWho here on ReadWriteWeb to enhance our community, some of our writers are using the less complicated Disqus platform on their personal blogs. We wonder if the amount of blog coverage has also affected SezWho's userbase compared to Disqus, which has seen tremendous coverage since its launch.

With SezWho, other important issues are being tackled beyond their enhanced reputation system such as keeping track of conversations over a plethora of platforms and enabling a more sophisticated way to discover relevant content. SezWho aims to enhance communities rather than replace them,but can they filter the noise that's add everyday?

When you're doing a web search, you instantly know what information is relevant and which isn't. At i360, they call this flash of understanding an "instant of information insight." In a split second you can identify something as being useful, but the problem in today's world is that there are too many ways to store that information - you can tag it, bookmark it, save it to file, email it, blog about it, share it with others, and so on. Overwhelmed by choices, busy people often choose to "just remember it," a decision that leads to the inevitable: forgetting. The human mind is already overloaded with input, so isn't the ideal repository for storing all the complexities of our information-filled lives.

Instead, software should be doing the remembering for us. That's where i360 comes in. The application itself is really just a prototype of this conceptual idea, but one that Tony hopes Google might be interested in. Or maybe Microsoft. (He plans on proposing his ideas to both companies to see who bites.)

What the i360 software does is provide a way quickly add mark up and add meaning to the data you're working with - be it a link on the web, an email, a file, or anything - with semantics. This process is done via a quick drag-and-drop into the app.

That isn't to say that this technology is using semantics in the technical sense of the word - it's not about converting everything into machine-readable formats for use on the semantic web; what it is doing, though, is adding semantics to everything by assigning meaning to that email, that PDF, that link, that note, that spreadsheet, etc. Meaning that only you, and not a computer or an algorithm, could know. In doing so, the technology is not focused on a semantic web per se, but a semantic database of your own, made up of not only web links, but also files, contacts, emails, keywords, and more, and knowing how they all are associated with each other.

Although Tony believes that we shouldn't give up on the algorithm - by all means, research should continue in that area - he feels strongly that his technology, which taps into the power of the human brain, gives people the ability to organize and assign value to information in a way that a machine cannot.

How It Works

What i360 does is complex and sort of hard to understand if you're not working with it directly. In fact, it's easier to understand if you work backwards from the end result of using the technology.

For example, imagine you do a Google Desktop Search or a Google Enterprise Search, and, instead of just links to items that match keywords, you get something a little more like this:

Augmented Search Results

You can see that by using the software, you've managed to associate people, documents, notes, and more with the original file.

The process of making these associations is via a "fire and move on" drag-and-drop methodology. See a useful link? Drag-and-drop it into i360. Highlight some text and drag and drop that as the item's description. Click a button and a screenshot is added automatically. Now associate that link with a person. That  person with a Word document. That document with a search and an email...and so forth, and so on.

Saving a Web Page

Within a company, the i360 technology can also be used to work with internally running applications, like Microsoft's SharePoint, for example...or any other application to which you have the cooperation of the vendor or access to the app's code base. With 100 lines of code, information from these applications can pass data from the app itself back to the i360 environment as just another informational nugget that can be associated with a person, a file, or anything else.

There's more this application can do, too. For example, searches themselves could begin in a more structured format - focusing on just what you're interested in finding (see example below). Each item you're researching can be available with one click from a sidebar - no saving to del.icio.us required.

Focused Searching

The results of your searches can then be transformed into a new file with links (see below), retaining the same structure of your own headings and listed items, and that file can then be emailed to someone else or published as a page available publicly on the web. If you find something new to add to it, be it another link or a file or anything else, you can just drag-and-drop that new item to i360 to update the results on the fly.

Formatted Results Can Be Shared With Others

A project team in the workplace could use the application together, associating people and emails and files and searches with each other, creating a database of content surrounding their project. A year later, an employee in another department could search via their company's enterprise search and find all the information in that project and how it all interrelates, even if all the original team members had moved on to other jobs in other companies. No more would "everything is stored in that one guy's head" be the norm. Employees could move on, but the data they created or found, and the way that data relates to other data, would remain.

Where It Needs Improvement

As a concept - simple drag-and-drop semantics - the technology is fascinating. In practice though, it's still very rough. You couldn't install i360 and be off and running in minutes - you would still need training to know how to use it as it exists in its present form. It today's world of bubbly web apps, anything that isn't immediately intuitive isn't going to be adopted by the majority of users. The whole Enterprise 2.0 trend is about bringing the simplicity of consumer applications into the corporate world, and, although that is this software's goal, unfortunately, I can't say that it achieves it.

The UI itself is confusing. They've made some interesting choices - the address bar is at the bottom, for example; buttons are labeled with things like "E+" - a reference to the name of a portion of the software suite, but one that is meaningless to the new user. The graphics and fonts used look ancient.

The UI

Conclusion

However, that being said, if you can look past the UI to the underlying idea, there's something about this concept - human-powered semantics - semantics over everything - that could be great, if someone could just make it pretty. It could even be the future.

To grasp what this all means, we'll translate into plain English:

A large part of the content on the web is generated by web applications that are driven by databases on the back-end. For example, look at the top 15 most popular web apps hosted at Sourceforge:

Sourceforge Projects, Image via Triplify.org

However, the structure and semantics in these relational databases behind apps, such as those above, are not accessible by search engines. What Triplfiy does is use the structured nature of the databases behind these and other, similar apps to generate semantic data.

How It Works

The Triplify plugin generates database views by performing a small number of queries against the web app's database. These views are then converted into a semantic format - either RDF, JSON, or Linked Data representations. Once in this format, data can then be shared and accessed on the Semantic Web.

Triplify Overview, Image via Triplify.org

To install the plugin, you download and extract the folder containing the script into your web app. Then download a Triplify configuration matching your Web application or create a new one. There's an example file to get started with, or you can use one of the files already available, like this one for WordPress or this one for Joomla.

Finally, integrate the plugin into your web application. (More info here).

Benefits

Once the web app has been "triplified," search engines can better evaluate the content, and semantic search engines, like Sindice, SWSE, or Swoogle can do the same.

But even better, once Triplify is installed, your web app becomes easily mashable with other web data sources via a tool like Yahoo! Pipes, for example.

The Challenge

Because those behind Triplify feel strongly about expediting the deployment of the Semantic Web, they're posing a challenge to the web developer community: develop the most innovative and promising semantifications and win fabulous prizes!

The first prize is a MacBook Air, second prize is an Asus EeePC, and third prize is an iPod Touch.

To get a better idea of what they will be looking for, check out the Challenge page of the Triplify site.

"Qitera is a web service empowering you to build and access your personal knowledge (the geeks call it “knowledge graph”). So you can organize, remix and search all the data dealing with the companies, business partners, friends or projects you track in a more productive way. Additionally, we let you share your wisdom with your peers and publish to blogs, websites and cell phones."

There is little mention of Qitera on Technorati, Google, or other sources. I did however find a slideshow on Slideshare, which featured this graphic illustrating its open standards support:

Below is the full slideshow. Let us know in the comments if you've seen Qitera in action - and if so what did you think? Meantime I've applied for a beta pass to check it out.