Category Archives: semantic

News personalisation as it should be

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Online news was supposed to lead to “The Daily Me”, hyper-personalised publications where the homepage is magically tailored to each user’s interests. But with a handful of notable exceptions – particularly certain mobile sites – few news sites have implemented personalisation features in any significant way.

TheMediaBriefing, the new media news aggregator edited by my friend and former Press Gazette colleague Patrick Smith, is showing everyone else how simple it could be.

The site uses semantic tagging technology to (re-)categorise media news from dozens of sources. Each category created by this tagging process generates generates an index page, like this one for (my new employer) the Financial Times.

With one click, logged-in uses can chose to “follow” those categories that they are interested in. This generates a personalised homepage, called “My Tracker” that merges all the their “followed” categories.

The interface is familiar to anyone who has used Facebook’s Like buttons to add friends and topics to their news feed. It uses the existing category structure of the site, so it’s the sort of thing any news site could implement. It’s a surprise so few news sites do anything similar.

The only other similar feature I’m aware of is on The Sporting News, which allows users to follow individual categories on Facebook using Facebook Like buttons, and has claimed massive success in driving traffic from this. Are there any other examples out there?

Rory Brown: The Michaelmas Itch – and a new beginning in business media

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Rory Brown: "Over the past few months Neil and I have been discussing the opportunities to launch a series of niche B2B sites without the legacy issues that many traditional publishers face. ... in summary we are looking to combine some very clever semantic technology with traditional niche publishing disciplines to create a series of websites. I’m delighted that Patrick Smith has also recently joined us as our first Editor. ... The initial site aims to launch towards the end of September ..."

Neil Thackray’s Business Media Blog: A Future for Business Media

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"In the next few weeks we will be launching a new business media company trading as Briefing Media Ltd.... The co founders of Briefing Media are me and Rory Brown. ... We are using an innovative semantic search algorithm to organise and navigate the content with each vertical site being supervised by an expert analyst who constantly updates and improves the taxonomy and the content. ... You probably want to have a look at our first site – but you will have to be patient for a month or so. We expect to release our first vertical towards the end of September and have already identified six more to develop over the coming months."

ReadWriteWeb: Facebook Open Graph: The Definitive Guide For Publishers, Users and Competitors

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RWW on the implications of Facebook Open Graph for publishers: "any site that already has social networking built in has to decide to abandon that before jumping into the Facebook Open Graph. The even worse problem is the ownership of ratings and comments. Are publishers really ready to give that up?" Also, implications for the semantic web: "What Facebook has done has a chance to make vast parts of the consumer Web including movies, books, music, events, sports, and news semantically tagged. Publishers and websites finally have a strong incentive to mark things up and get return traffic from Facebook."

Slate Magazine: Introducing News Dots

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"News Dots scans all the articles from major publications—about 500 a day—and submits them to Calais ... Each time two tags appear in the same story, this tool tallies one connection between them. ... s this tool scans hundreds of stories, this network grows rapidly, and "communities" begin to form among the tags. ... The news network that results is visualized using Slate's custom News Dots tool, which is built using an open-source Actionscript library called Flare."

Techcrunch: Bit.ly’s Grand Plans, And Their Inevitable Clash With Digg: Bitly Now

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"Bit.ly’s new Bit.ly Now service will show popular links at any given time, just like Digg (for now, Bit.ly sends the most popular link every hour to a twitter account). When Bit.ly Now launches, that link data will be combined with additional metadata about the URLs. In particular, they plan to extract important entities, people and topics from the stories in real time, allowing for a categorized approach to popular links. Bit.ly says they are talking to a number of third party services, including Reuter’s Open Calais, to help them do this."

Nieman Journalism Lab: Knight News Challenge: A grant to DocumentCloud promises a data boost for investigative journalism

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"DocumentCloud’s vision is to collect, archive, and index the text and metadata of all documents used by participating news organizations, advocacy groups, bloggers, and others — “so they’re not just sitting in the corner of a newsroom collecting dust,” Pilhofer explained."