Interested in being a ReadWriteWeb sponsor? ReadWriteWeb is one of the most popular blogs in the world and is read by a sophisticated audience of thought leaders and decision-makers. We have several innovative new features in our sponsor packages that we'd love to tell you about. Email our COO Bernard Lunn for all the details.

Skip to info about: Calais: semantic Web API | Socialtext: enterprise 2.0 | Mashery: API management services | Rackspace: cloud computing experts | Aplus.net: Web hosting | Crowd Science: demographic data | Smub: mobile sharing | 2009 Semantic Technology Conference: semantic search and tech | Hakia: semantic search | Media Temple and SixApart: our hosts and blogging software

Calais

Calais, powered by Thomson Reuters, brings state-of-the-art semantic functionality into your blog, content management system, site or application. Calais 4.0 was released in January, for the first time allowing publishers to connect to the Linked Data Web standard. Calais 4.0 goes beyond meta-tagging and enables publishers to integrate their content with Linked Data assets from Wikipedia, GeoNames, the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), Shopping.com, and others. Calais 4.0 also lets publishers share semantic meta-data about their content with "content consumers" such as search engines, news aggregators, related stories recommendation services, and more.

Check out the incredible work being done at Calais and let us know what you think.

Socialtext

Socialtext provides an enterprise wiki platform for organizations who want to accelerate knowledge sharing, foster collaboration, or build online communities.

Socialtext is currently offering a free white paper entitled "5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration." It explains how collaboration solutions (a.k.a. Enterprise 2.0) can "dramatically reduce enterprise cycle times and costs. These results may be critical to survival in difficult economic times, and the right collaboration solution is the easiest, most cost effective way to achieve them."

Download Socialtext's free white paper at http://socialtext.com.

Crowd Science

Crowd Science gives online publishers reports on the demographics and attitudes of their audience. We at ReadWriteWeb have signed up to this new service, because demographic data is something we've struggled to get in the past. It's important for any online business to know their audience, so Crowd Science is a welcome addition to the stats armory that most of us in the Internet biz use.

You can sign up to get demographic data by clicking here.

Mashery

Mashery is a platform for Web services, allowing companies to manage their APIs using Mashery's expertise. At the "Business of APIs" conference, Mashery CEO Oren Michels explained to the audience that while APIs are a technology, their use is a business decision. He went on to say that Mashery has helped customers such as WhitePages.com, Thumbplay, Compete.com, and Calais. Check out the white paper "Five steps to scaling your business development using Web services" to discover how you can use APIs for your business.

You can find out more about APIs and their business use at www.mashery.com.

Rackspace

Rackspace is one of the world's largest hosting providers, but it's also competing in the cloud computing arena. In October Rackspace announced two major acquisitions: SliceHost and JungleDisk. Slicehost is a popular cloud computing and hosting provider with about 15,000 users, while JungleDisk is one of our favorite online backup services. JungleDisk used to rely on Amazon's S3 storage solution, but it now also supports Rackspace's cloud storage solution. At the same time, Rackspace also announced a new suite of services, Rackspace Cloud Hosting, which combines a hosting platform (CloudSites) with a cloud storage solution (CloudFS), and, in the long run, a tight integration with Slicehost's services.

Click here to explore Rackspace's hosting and cloud computing solutions.

Aplus.net

Aplus.net offers a variety of services relating to Web hosting, including shared hosting, dedicated server, managed hosting, Web design, marketing and online advertising services, search engine optimization, e-commerce solutions, and domain registration.

You can register for Aplus.net here.

Smub

Smub is the first truly mobile bookmarking, link-sharing tool. Smub lets you share and save any link easily from your iPhone, Mac, or PC without a plugin or application.

Type smub.it/ to the left of http:// on any link to save or share, and Smub will automatically take you through the process. Make the link public to share with others, or keep it private just for yourself. Smub has built-in sharing to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and more.

2009 Semantic Technology Conference

What are the big players doing in semantic search? Which startups are challenging them? How does semantic technology change search results? What key advantages and new opportunities does semantics provide in consumer and business search markets?

At the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference, taking place from 14 to 18 June 2009 in San Jose, semantic applications and usage cases will be presented by product developers and technical experts in such fields as advertising, business process management, cloud computing, digital asset management, and e-commerce.

Hakia

Hakia is a general purpose "semantic" search engine that delivers a search experience based on focus, clarity, and credibility. Today's search engines retrive popular results via statistical ranking, but popular websites are not always credible and credible websites are not always popular.

Hakia's semantic technology provides a new search experience based on quality, not popularity. Its search results come from credible websites recommended by librarians; they represent the most recent information available and remain absolutely relevant to the query.

Our Gracious Hosts and Blogging Software

ReadWriteWeb is hosted by Media Temple and is published using SixApart's Movable Type.

If you've ever wondered what ReadWriteWeb looks like behind the scenes, or if you've never seen the Movable Type publishing interface - that's it on the left. We recently upgraded to MT 4.23, which is the latest version. We got onto this release as soon as it was available - in fact our contacts at Six Apart emailed the actual code to us before it was up on their website. That's customer service for you!

The companies above pay our rents or mortgages and we appreciate it. We hope you'll stop by their sites and see what they've got to offer.

Have you got a smart company that could use some more visits by the sophisticated readers of a blog like ReadWriteWeb's? Drop us a line and let's talk.

Thanks to all our sponsors and our readers for your support!

This a personal impression based on actual conversations, not based on the attendance list.

• Serial entrepreneurs seeking their next big venture. I spoke to two of them. What was interesting was that both were very successful, knew very little about the semantic Web (they were there to learn), and were extremely open to seeking where the opportunities lie. In other words, they were at the formative stages of their ventures.
• Semantic Web pioneers. Conference organizers made it very clear they did not want an echo chamber of SemWeb experts talking to SemWeb experts. They wanted SemWeb experts to connect with business people who had problems that needed solving. That seemed to be happening.
• Connectors, money guys, promoters. There were quite a few of these, usually a sign that something is either happening or about to happen.
• Publishers. Well, the conference was in New York, so you would expect publishers, of all types, both big and small.
• Semantic Web ventures that are already getting traction. Most of these appearances took the form of speakers and conference sponsors.

Where Is the Value in this Next Phase of the Web?

This is what the serial entrepreneurs were asking. Here is my view after a few days of reflection. Three big market opportunities will see semantic Web technology used in different ways in the near term:

• Scientific/technical/medical (STM) publishing,
• Market research information created from random social media chatter,
• Improved advertising relevance.

Each of these deserves closer inspection.

Scientific/Technical/Medical Publishing

Open-source data will disrupt traditional data publishing -- in particular and immediately STM publishing -- similar to how open-source software disrupted the software industry. STM publishing is a market worth more than $10 billion, so this is significant. Similar forces will play out in financial, legal, and other data-rich industries, but STM is likely to be in the vanguard for the following reasons:

• Everybody in the eco-system wants this to happen except the current publishers. Governments and institutions that fund research want it to be freely available. The authors are not like book authors; they don't get paid per book sold. They want wide distribution and peer recognition.
• There are huge benefits to the raw data being machine-readable, not the least of which is that the data can be used for further analysis, rather than be squeezed into the artificial format designed for print journal distribution.
• Scientists and researchers will use the semantic Web tools that consumers and business people consider too complex (until some great UI designers take on this challenge).

As in any market transition, there will be winners and losers.

Winners:

• Scientists and researchers,
• (Indirectly) everyone who benefits from the products created by scientists and researchers,
• New publishers (or some other entity) that add enough value to free source data that they are still able to charge for it.

Losers:

• Traditional STM publishers who cling too tightly to their current cash cow and so cannot effectively ride the next wave.

After it goes through the STM sector, this wave will crash through other data-rich publishing markets, such as:

• Finance
• Law

Market Research Information Created from Social Media Chatter

The Web 2.0 era has unleashed an enormous amount of social media chatter. These conversations are inconsequential to all except the participants... until, that is, they are aggregated, structured, and analyzed. This is not simple to do, as security and intelligence agencies have long understood. When you can record any conversation you like, you quickly find that discovering something useful is really hard. Historically, only intelligence agencies have had access to this volume of chatter. And the public has only had access to conversations between "important" people about important subjects. Multiply the chat you and I had about what we had for breakfast a few million times, and someone might get interested, specifically someone in the market research industry.

Market research is a large industry. Obtaining explicit data about people by getting them to fill in surveys is becoming increasingly hard and expensive. Perhaps gathering data about what people are actually talking about and deriving something useful from that would be easier.

This is not likely that elusive native revenue model for social media. But it could be a useful add-on revenue stream. Semantic Web ventures that can pay social media sites for raw data, extract that data, add meaning, and sell it to marketers could do very well. That won't be easy to do well, though.

Improved Advertising Relevance

AdWords represented a massive advance in advertising relevance. It changed the advertising and media industries beyond recognition and made Google the most powerful technology company on the planet.

But is this as far as we can go with advertising relevance? Almost certainly not. Whether Google or another venture leverages the semantic Web, there is little doubt that semantic Web technology will improve advertising relevance. Quite how to do this is the subject of another post.

Disclosure: Web 3.0 was a sponsor of ReadWriteWeb, but we have no other financial interest in the event.

But relying on page views is no longer an option. The lion's share of revenue that publishers generate comes from advertisers, and advertisers are now demanding to see more actionable ROI on their advertising dollars. Publishers are feeling the crunch.

ReadWriteWeb's own Bernard Lunn moderated a panel here that addressed a couple of the challenges that most publishers struggle with these days. Below are some of the salient points that emerged from the discussion.

How to Reduce the Cost of Creating High-Quality Content

• Embrace better tools to make processes more efficient. It is a fact that too many publishers are clamoring for an ever-decreasing share of the advertising pie (revenue). Publishers need to be leaders in innovation. Two-thirds of the industry is waiting for someone to lead the way; most of these followers will fall by the wayside, and the others will work from the platforms that the leaders become.
• Get readers to write content. Look for the top commenters in your reading community. Some of them would likely contribute posts to your site. Reach out to them.
• Write content that readers want. Website logs show which topics and posts draw the most interest from readers. Use this information to understand what content your readers want.
• How do you profit from content that has depth but takes time to research and write? Bernard emphasized that publishers make money by selling ads, and this money is typically tied to page views. A publisher can run a quick post like, "Lindsay Lohan's Twitter Meltdown," which may take mere minutes to write and generates 200,000 page views, whereas an in-depth post on something technical, which could take several days and several interviews to write, may generate only 20,000 page views. So should you bother writing those quick posts that are inevitably regurgitated by a ton of other publishers? Content with longevity eventually earns more money (like films, it generates revenue for years). Refocus your content so that it has staying power or can be archived somewhere for future licensing.

How to Increase Revenue

• Maximize your brand elsewhere. Andraz Tori, CTO of Zemanta, noted that not all media is monetizable. He believes that the consolidation of content and the creation of content via crowd-sourcing (e.g. Wikipedia) will ultimately drive the price of content to nothing. (Although some publishers will be able to charge for content, the way that D&B can still charge $10,000+ for profile reports on private companies). By spending time on in-depth content creation, you build your brand, allowing you to extend that brand to conferences, report sales, etc.
• Advertisers want engagement. Julie Nielsen of appssavvy said that so much inventory is available for advertisers to buy from, they don't even know where to look. Advertisers want actionable results; they want to track their ROI, and a click is not revenue to them. Publishers need to sell to advertisers that are relevant to their audience and then educate advertisers to purchase differently, partly by offering advertisers data (beyond mere clicks) that tells a deeper story about their brand engagement.

The panel obviously didn't have all the answers, but it started a good discussion that we hope to continue here. What ideas do you have, and what opportunities do you see in this shift in publishing?

Interested in being a ReadWriteWeb sponsor? ReadWriteWeb is one of the most popular blogs in the world and is read by a sophisticated audience of thought leaders and decision-makers. We have several innovative new features in our sponsor packages that we'd love to tell you about. Email our COO Bernard Lunn for all the details.

Skip to info about: Calais: semantic Web API | Socialtext: enterprise 2.0 | Mashery: API management services | Rackspace: cloud computing experts | Aplus.net: Web hosting | Crowd Science: demographic data | Smub: mobile sharing | Web 3.0 Conference: next-era technology | 2009 Semantic Technology Conference: semantic search and tech | Hakia: semantic search | Media Temple and SixApart: our hosts and blogging software

Calais

Calais, powered by Thomson Reuters, brings state-of-the-art semantic functionality into your blog, content management system, site or application. Calais 4.0 was released in January, for the first time allowing publishers to connect to the Linked Data Web standard. Calais 4.0 goes beyond meta-tagging and enables publishers to integrate their content with Linked Data assets from Wikipedia, GeoNames, the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), Shopping.com, and others. Calais 4.0 also lets publishers share semantic meta-data about their content with "content consumers" such as search engines, news aggregators, related stories recommendation services, and more.

Check out the incredible work being done at Calais and let us know what you think.

Socialtext

Socialtext provides an enterprise wiki platform for organizations who want to accelerate knowledge sharing, foster collaboration, or build online communities.

Socialtext is currently offering a free white paper entitled "5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration." It explains how collaboration solutions (a.k.a. Enterprise 2.0) can "dramatically reduce enterprise cycle times and costs. These results may be critical to survival in difficult economic times, and the right collaboration solution is the easiest, most cost effective way to achieve them."

Download Socialtext's free white paper at http://socialtext.com.

Crowd Science

Crowd Science gives online publishers reports on the demographics and attitudes of their audience. We at ReadWriteWeb have signed up to this new service, because demographic data is something we've struggled to get in the past. It's important for any online business to know their audience, so Crowd Science is a welcome addition to the stats armory that most of us in the Internet biz use.

You can sign up to get demographic data by clicking here.

Mashery

Mashery is a platform for Web services, allowing companies to manage their APIs using Mashery's expertise. At the "Business of APIs" conference, Mashery CEO Oren Michels explained to the audience that while APIs are a technology, their use is a business decision. He went on to say that Mashery has helped customers such as WhitePages.com, Thumbplay, Compete.com, and Calais. Check out the white paper "Five steps to scaling your business development using Web services" to discover how you can use APIs for your business.

You can find out more about APIs and their business use at www.mashery.com.

Rackspace

Rackspace is one of the world's largest hosting providers, but it's also competing in the cloud computing arena. In October Rackspace announced two major acquisitions: SliceHost and JungleDisk. Slicehost is a popular cloud computing and hosting provider with about 15,000 users, while JungleDisk is one of our favorite online backup services. JungleDisk used to rely on Amazon's S3 storage solution, but it now also supports Rackspace's cloud storage solution. At the same time, Rackspace also announced a new suite of services, Rackspace Cloud Hosting, which combines a hosting platform (CloudSites) with a cloud storage solution (CloudFS), and, in the long run, a tight integration with Slicehost's services.

Click here to explore Rackspace's hosting and cloud computing solutions.

Aplus.net

Aplus.net offers a variety of services relating to Web hosting, including shared hosting, dedicated server, managed hosting, Web design, marketing and online advertising services, search engine optimization, e-commerce solutions, and domain registration.

You can register for Aplus.net here.

Web 3.0 Conference

The core idea behind Web 3.0 is to extract much more meaningful, actionable insight from information. At the Web 3.0 Conference, taking place in New York City from 19 to 20 May 2009, participants will explore how companies are using the emerging technology collectively known as Web 3.0 for significant bottom-line impact in areas like marketing, corporate information management, customer service, and personal productivity.

ReadWriteWeb readers save 15% with the discount code XRWW.

Smub

Smub is the first truly mobile bookmarking, link-sharing tool. Smub lets you share and save any link easily from your iPhone, Mac, or PC without a plugin or application.

Type smub.it/ to the left of http:// on any link to save or share, and Smub will automatically take you through the process. Make the link public to share with others, or keep it private just for yourself. Smub has built-in sharing to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and more.

2009 Semantic Technology Conference

What are the big players doing in semantic search? Which startups are challenging them? How does semantic technology change search results? What key advantages and new opportunities does semantics provide in consumer and business search markets?

At the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference, taking place from 14 to 18 June 2009 in San Jose, semantic applications and usage cases will be presented by product developers and technical experts in such fields as advertising, business process management, cloud computing, digital asset management, and e-commerce.

Hakia

Hakia is a general purpose "semantic" search engine that delivers a search experience based on focus, clarity, and credibility. Today's search engines retrive popular results via statistical ranking, but popular websites are not always credible and credible websites are not always popular.

Hakia's semantic technology provides a new search experience based on quality, not popularity. Its search results come from credible websites recommended by librarians; they represent the most recent information available and remain absolutely relevant to the query.

Find out what makes Hakia different.

Our Gracious Hosts and Blogging Software

ReadWriteWeb is hosted by Media Temple and is published using SixApart's Movable Type.

If you've ever wondered what ReadWriteWeb looks like behind the scenes, or if you've never seen the Movable Type publishing interface - that's it on the left. We recently upgraded to MT 4.23, which is the latest version. We got onto this release as soon as it was available - in fact our contacts at Six Apart emailed the actual code to us before it was up on their website. That's customer service for you!

The companies above pay our rents or mortgages and we appreciate it. We hope you'll stop by their sites and see what they've got to offer.

Have you got a smart company that could use some more visits by the sophisticated readers of a blog like ReadWriteWeb's? Drop us a line and let's talk.

Thanks to all our sponsors and our readers for your support!