Zemanta’s inked a deal with Federated Media that could make brand advertising via blogosphere contributions scale higher, faster. Federated Media lets independent bloggers participate as partner-publishers in programs to build brand engagement. For example, for Dockers, Federated Media had publishers with a strong male following write articles around the theme of men crafting lifetime legacies, which were used to increase page-views and clicks to, and reader interaction with, Dockers.

Zemanta’s technology has its roots in helping bloggers with suggestions of tags, links, photos, related articles, and more to add contextual relevance to their content. It analyzes posts using proprietary natural language processing and semantic algorithms, and statistically comparing its contextual framework to its pre-indexed database of content to supply its recommendations. Zemanta content sources include Wikipedia, IMDb, Amazon, Flickr, Crunchbase, Rotten Tomatoes and Freebase, among many others.

Zemanta CTO Andraz Tori says that the big advantage Zemanta brings to the relationship is that it has lots of engaged bloggers as well as the technologies to ‘understand’ what they are writing about. “FM usually worked just with couple of hundred bloggers and we’ll be able to scale that to many more,” he says.

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Semantic Tech & Business Conference Returns to San Francisco

Semantic Tech & Business Conference returns to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!

It cannot be denied that Stephen Wolfram knows data. As the person behind Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, he has been working with data — and the computation of that data — for a long time. As he said in his blog yesterday, “In building Wolfram|Alpha, we’ve absorbed an immense amount of data, across a huge number of domains.  But—perhaps surprisingly—almost none of it has come in any direct way from the visible internet. Instead, it’s mostly from a complicated patchwork of data files and feeds and database dumps.”

The main topic of Wolfram’s post is a proposal about the form and placement of raw data on the internet. In the post, he proposes that .data be created as a new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) to hold data in a “parallel construct.”

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Are you starting to feel like there’s no real winning investment strategies these days, at least for the average investor? Make some gains one month, only to lose them all the next.

Well, maybe it’s time to invest a little something in efforts that might not pay you back in dollars, but in online badges, acknowledgement of your contributions or donations, maybe even in a chance to provide input into a solution that can advance semantic web, Linked Data, or discovery technologies? Or maybe the ROI is just about feeling that you did something good.

Recently we wrote about Sebastian Trüg’s fundraiser to keep the Nepomuk semantic desktop alive, for example, which this month reached its 9000€ initial goal (though he’s still in search of long-term funding). Turns out there are – or recently have been – other opportunities to put some of your pocket change to work for a smarter and more meaningful web of data. Projects on Kickstarter.com, for instance, run the gamut from fashion ($1 to fund chic 3D glasses), to theatre (you can help launch the LA production of Spring Awakening for $10 or more), to technology.

Kickstarter builds itself as the world’s largest funding platform for great projects, and whiling away the late-night hours wandering through the crowd-funding forum, it surprised me to learn that among its successfully funded projects were efforts including hypothes.is, the brainchild of online travel industry pioneer Dan Whaley. This is described as “a distributed, open-source platform for the collaborative evaluation of information. It will enable sentence-level critique of written words combined with a sophisticated yet easy-to-use model of community peer-review. It will work as an overlay on top of any stable content, including news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and regulations, software code and more-without requiring participation of the underlying site.”

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Bioinformatics software provider IO Informatics recently released its free Knowledge Explorer Personal Edition. Version 3.6 of the Personal Edition can handle most of what Knowledge Explorer Professional 3.6, launched in October, can, but it does all its work in memory without direct connectivity to a back-end database.

“In particular, a lot of the strengths of Knowledge Explorer have to do with modeling data as RDF and then testing queries, visualizing and browsing the data to see that you have the ontologies and data mappings you need for your integration and application requirements.” says Robert Stanley, IO Informatics president and CEO. The Personal version is aimed at academic experts focused on data integration and semantic data modeling, as well as personal power users in life sciences and other data-intensive industries, or anyone who wants to learn the tool in anticipation of leveraging their enterprise data sets for collaboration and integration projects.

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Zite, the personalized news magazine app for the iPad, adds an iPhone version of its application to the lineup today. The company, which we wrote about here and which was acquired this summer by CNN, has focused on making the semantically-intelligent app fit the smaller-size format of the smartphone, with one-thumb navigation, vertical story and left-to-right category view flow, and a focus on the facts of story name, title and source , rather than snippets, as starter views.

CEO Mark Johnson says a prerequisite for the iPhone app was its release of Sybil technology in late October, which allowed Zite to have multiple profiles that adapt to the reader’s preference. This made it possible to share the Zite app on a family’s sole iPad without messing up individuals’ preferences. It comes in handy for the new smartphone app because, “if you did all this work on your iPad training this very intelligent AI, you don’t want to lose that when you go to the iPhone,” Johnson says.

Johnson expects the iPhone app to appeal to existing iPad users. “Personalization is really addictive. Once you have it one place, you want it everywhere,” he says

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FindtheBest (the site where users can compare some 700 topics side by side, initially discussed here) has some new capabilities on tap. This includes what it says are soft joins for relating together diverse data sets.

“Joins is a very hard database connection between two tables. Soft joins are a little more semantic,” says CEO Kevin O’Connor, co-founder of DoubleClick. “We’re linking a lot of data sets together on a loose basis.” To the end, he says, of trying to “cross-relate information a lot more, trying to discern all the data we have and give it some semantic meaning into ways people can understand it. It turns out there’s a huge, huge number of these semantic relationship between our data.”

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Is it time to disrupt the hospitality survey services industry? TrustYou thinks so. Today it’s launching its ReviewAnalyst Survey, a free guest satisfaction tool that hotels and hotel chains can use to integrate information from visitor surveys with information in social media reviews, and potentially bolster their reputation among consumers as a result.

TrustYou already monitors social sentiment across the web in online reviews, posts, and comments for the hotel, travel, and restaurant sectors.“Our key advantage is that we are the only ones in the space, I think, who tackled the key fundamentals of how can we scale this in as many languages as we want to,” says CEO Ben Jost. “That’s very interesting for the hospitality industry, because it’s very international. We currently have 12 languages and today, if we have enough content, we can add a new language each day if we want to.

And we can learn the key concepts for a new vertical every three to four weeks.”

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In addition to getting the best retail deals for friends and family on Black Friday or this very Cyber-Monday, the holiday season also is a good time to think about helping others.

Semantic technology is playing a part in that too – both from the standpoint of consumers who want to reach out and the organizations that want to be reached out to.

DailyFeats, a social platform for positive actions that incorporates detailed semantic understanding about such efforts in order to categorize them and recommend to users related actions (see here), is building up more partnerships for supporting good causes. It’s recently added opportunities for users to redeem the points they earn on the service for partner donations to 501©3 non-profits. For 50 points, Cigna, for example, will make a $1 donation to P2V, which matches military veterans with shelter pets to help them heal from psychological wounds.

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Computer Economics has just released its 2011/2012 IT Spending and Staffing Benchmarks survey. And guess what? Some of its findings make a case for business’ IT leaders to put semantic technologies high up the priorities list.

Not that the report spells that out, exactly. But here are some things it does say that help us form that conclusion. Take, for instance, the finding that IT spending has not yet strongly recovered. The study reports that both IT operational and capital spending is rising, but not at a strong increase. On top of that, it says that many IT executives lack confidence in their spending plans, even though confidence, at least, is higher today than during the previous two years.

Why not look beyond that mix of “eh” and “ok” news to this option: Leverage semantic web technologies to stretch IT budgets further in key areas.

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You don’t have to read very far into your iPad news app to learn the latest about government dysfunctionality, debt, and defaults, whether in the U.S. or abroad. It’s all a little overwhelming, and can’t help but have an impact on how so many nations’ citizens view their present circumstances and their futures, too.

Amid so many negatives, perhaps we can take some inspiration from the fact that this month will see the Open Government Data Camp 2011 being held in Warsaw, Poland. Think about that for a minute: A country that not all that long ago was controlled by an iron fist and blocked from the free world by the Iron Curtain is the host site for the Open Knowledge Foundation event — an undertaking that is very much focused on making government data more transparent and interoperable and transformative for the societies whose governing bodies adopt open data principles and values.

Maybe thinking about things in that light will help anyone discouraged by current events to hope still for a brighter future. Among the presenters at the event discussing how open data can be essential to realizing transformation is Bernadette Hyland, co-chair W3C Government Linked Data Working Group and CEO of 3 Round Stones. Hyland also will be co-conducting a half-day Government Linked Data Workshop during the course of the camp. Hyland’s speech, a report on the progress of the W3C Government Linked Data Working Group, will hone in on why it’s important to share government information and the benefits to be attained from doing so, including transforming how governments serve their citizens in the 21st Century. (The W3C Government Linked Data Working Group is chartered to produce standards and document best practices for the publication of governmental data.)

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