Clark Lake Michigan

Originally uploaded by gerryfcampbell.

Happy 4th!

I am here.

Originally uploaded by gerryfcampbell.

This is where I am. Relaxing. A thought is running through my head…

Creating something of value can be immediate and simple, given the right mix of quality resources. Recent experiences make that perfectly clear.

All of the tools exist to make great things - increasingly so - and it’s time to give it a try.

I can’t believe how time flies. I am a lucky guy.

Here it is. I am going to continue to tweek it as I go, but the big news is that I now have a cool little lucky robot guy. Suitable for shirts, business cards and the web.

I want to give the credit for the custom robot character design to my new friend Kurt Aspland (kurtaspland.com) who I found via Google AdWords.

Now I can get back to thinking about those posts I am conjuring up in my mind…

Also, as I write this, Calais is suggesting tags and images for the post. Like it. 

The 60’s were a glorious time!

Worth a read if you have a minute. I miss the 60’s. Actually, I don’t remember the 60’s… but I still miss them.

Good week and good progress from two projects that are near and dear to my heart.

  & 

1) Summize released a location feature that isolates comments and conversations to a geographic area. Great for getting a sense of events (tech meetup NY vs tech meetup SF) and happenings (see what people IN CHINA are saying about the earthquake vs people in Columbus, Ohio)

We pitched this feature and more importantly the concept of Conversation Search and the Global Conversation at the Tech Meetup in New York last night. Watch the video if you’d like.

Positive momentum in terms of traffic in the last 4 weeks since the April launch of Summize’s Twitter search

2) Calais (or OpenCalais) set forth a new release of its free semantic tagging service. Folks - if you haven’t checked this one out you really should. It’s a groundbreaking free service for publishers who want to automatically tag content and generate metadata. The new release offers an enhanced set of things it will recognize in content. One biggie is pop culture… now Calais is ready for autotagging all of the entertainment content out there. Good step forward. There are also several other features included in the release such as simplified results, Drupal support and a snazzy new website.

Until this week Calais has offered a service that’s open for developers - not as useful or accessible to non-coders like me. That changed this week as the new Tagaroo Wordpress plugin was also released. Going to put that up here as soon as I get a few minutes. Also, there are an impressive set of third-party apps from the developer community growing up around Calais - many good projects there too.

Another thing to note that’s just plain jawdropping is Firef.ly. It’s community browsing and commenting - without a browser plugin. Very cool. It’s a Betaworks company - one of many cool things coming from there. Very happy to be advising and spending time with John Borthwick, Andy Weissman and the crew.

There are several other interesting things going on. For another day.

The much awaited Calais Wordpress plugin is coming. I plan to install it here next week. Really looking forward to it…

1) I have gone independent - leaving my good friends and respected colleagues at Reuters (now ThomsonReuters) to take a spin at early-stage ventures. Advising, angel investing, like an EIR without the “residence” part. I’ll write more about it soon.

2) One of the companies I am working with is Summize. Very promising platform for real time conversation search. This is a whole new world of opportunity for user experience and monetization. As I told a friend recently this isn’t the  “there must be a pony in here somewhere” big, it’s “if we execute cleanly, align well and get the wind at our backs, this is an entirely new way of using the web” big. The big hit at the moment for summize is twitter search. One twitterer tweeted (say that 10 times fast) that it’s so good, it gives you a reason to use twitter. I agree. Check it out.

3) Working closely with Betaworks too. Very interesting stuff brewing there and it’s a treat to spend time with John and Andy as they get their betaworks mojo in full swing. I’m working with a few other companies too, I’ll post a little about them too soon.

4) Calais is continuing to catalyze the adoption of the semantic/text analytic approach. We’re just starting to scratch the surface of the potential here. Very excited about this and I plan to stay closely involved with Tom Tague, Barak Pridor and the rest of my close friends at Clearforest as we continue to drive this forward.

5) Luckyrobot has a new design coming. Should happen pretty quickly. Looking forward to that.

Onward and upward

I had the opportunity to give a keynote this week at the annual Fast Search and Transfer (soon to be a part of Microsoft) partner event. The overall topic was “The User Revolution” and my specific piece focused on unlocking the next generation of user satisfaction through the application of semantic context to the search equation.

My underlying premise is that what we currently know as search isn’t powerful enough nor is it well suited to solve the problem we all face every day: out of the 6,803,098 documents relevant to your personal quest, which ones matter? Which ones contain key information that will allow you to find not only WHAT you want but WHY it’s important to your need.

Going beyond that, how can you find out what’s related, what’s important that you’re NOT looking for but need to know? These are the things that lead to true insight - and we haven’t improved, as an industry, in over 10 years. Major indictment for all of us proud folks who have building search products on the web for 10+ years.

The answer is simple but not easy - we need technologies that empower users to sift through the information and actually traverse the concepts (structure) that underly the vast amount of free text (unstructured).

That’s where text analytics, semantic analysis and the whole realm of metadata and tagging come in.

There’s a logjam, though. Metadata is not easy to produce, and it’s never consistent. It’s not even part of the CMS workflow frequently.

The problem has been vexing. Until now.

Bang your content against the Calais API and it comes back tagged in W3C-standard RDF. Use it for SEO, use it for navigation. Use it to bring in related feeds to retain users on your site (pageviews) and to target your ads (ad revenue). It’s all great.

I have to give a huge shout-out to Tom Tague who is the mastermind and driver, as well as Barak Pridor and the entire Reuters/Clearforest team working on this.

So, if you’re interested, here’s the FastForward08 presentation, and here’s a link to my interview afterwards. I will put up the link to the full length video as soon as it’s available.

This week we released the beta version of the open API for our new Calais Web service, and debuted our new developer community at www.OpenCalais.com.  

The Calais Web service is a free metatagging service that enables both publishers and content consumers – search engines, news portals, RSS Readers, etc. – to automatically metatag the people, places facts and events in online content. Doing so adds an important layer of Semantic intelligence to that content while increasing its relevance and accessibility on the Web. (You can read more about the speicifcs of this initial API release in our press release here.) 

Why does the Semantic Web matter?   Let me go back to the beginning of my interest in the Semantic Web – some ten years ago. The Semantic Web – often referred to as ‘the Data Web’ and considered part of ‘Web 3.0’ –enables computers to access and use the meaning of words, instead of just noting their presence on a page or mapping that page’s relationship to others.  Also called the ‘Great Global Graph’ by Tim Berners-Lee, the Semantic Web adds a new layer of context to content, commerce and community sites that enables computers to detect existing connections and make new ones. Once this new layer of context is created, ‘intelligent agents’ can be built that can access data across a variety of applications. For instance, a simple movie bot might scan the Web for film titles, returning links to synopses, credits, reviews, ratings, listings and tickets in one easy place.  The basic promise of the Semantic Web is aligned with the Data Portability initiative, which posits that individual Web users should be able to share their identities, photos, videos and other personal data between chosen and trusted tools and vendors.  Both initiatives are about enabling applications to share data and communicate amongst themselves – with the requisite privacy protections in place – to automate the exchange of information where possible and let human beings focus on bigger picture tasks. 

Why do we need this much help? Despite the plethora of cool Web 2.0 apps – in fact, in part because of them – people are still suffering from information overload.  Web 2.0 has set content free to roam the Web via feeds, bookmarking services, widgets, social networks, etc.  And while this “opportunistic” distribution of information has increased the accessibility of insight overall, it hasn’t helped us find exactly what we need when we need it.   Semantic tagging offers superior sorting and filtering of content for more targeted and timely delivery. 

What’s the hold up? Good question. 

The Semantic Web has historically struggled with two problems: 

  1.) The Semantic Chicken & Egg  •   Semantic applications require publisher metadata in order to attract users and gain popularity •     Publishers will only bother to create metadata when Semantic applications get popular 

  2.) Metadata Cost & Transport  •   Creating quality metadata entails costs and resources that most publishers can’t afford.•          There is no way to transport metadata with the content as it moves thru feeds, widgets, etc.  

The good news: Today, not only are Semantic search tools cropping up – like Powerset, Spock and Wikia – but consumer-facing Semantic applications have emerged, like Twine, Freebase and TripIt.  Publishers and providers now seek a simple, effective way to tag their content, make it accessible to these new applications and export it liberally across the Web. 

OpenCalais.com  Drop by OpenCalais.com (www.OpenCalais.com) and check it out.  Note that this is a beta, and our initial release, so you can expect to see additional languages and functionality as we evolve. I would love to get your feeback, which will help guide the addition of new features and additional developer support as we go forward.