Q: What do Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Yandex, the New York Times, and The Walt Disney Company have in common?

A: schema.org

On June 2, 2011, schema.org was launched with little fanfare, but it quickly received a lot of attention. Now, almost exactly one year later, we have assembled a panel of experts from the organizations listed above to discuss what has happened since and what we have to look forward to as the vocabulary continues to grow and evolve, including up-to-the-minute news and announcements. The panel will take place at the upcoming Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco.

Moderated by Ivan Herman, the Semantic Web Activity Lead for the World Wide Web Consortium, the panel includes representatives from each of the core search engines involved in schema.org, and two of the largest early implementers: The New York Times and Disney. Among the topics we will discuss will be the value proposition of using schema.org markup, publishing techniques and syntaxes, vocabularies that have been mapped to schema.org, current tools and applications, existing implementations, and a look forward at what is planned and what is needed to encourage adoption and consumption.

Panelists:

	Moderator: Ivan Herman Semantic Web Activity Lead, World Wide Web Consortium		Dan Brickley Contractor, schema.org at Google
	John Giannandrea Director Engineering, Google		Peter Mika Senior Researcher, Yahoo!
	Alexander Shubin Product Manager, Head of Strategic Direction, Yandex		Mike Van Snellenberg Principal Program Manager, Microsoft/Bing
	Evan Sandhaus Semantic Technologist, New York Times Company		Jeffrey W. Preston SEO Manager, Disney Interactive Media Group

These panelists, along with the rest of the more than 120 speakers from SemTechBiz, will be on-hand to answer audience questions and discuss the latest work in Semantic Technologies. You can join the discussion by registering for SemTechBiz – San Francisco today (and save $200 off the onsite price)

 

SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

Are you wondering why your product pages don’t stand out in search results like those from Amazon (shown below) or other competing e-commerce websites? These expanded results are commonly known as Rich Snippets (as named by Google) and are the result of having your HTML structured correctly with semantic markup. Whether you’re savvy to HTML5 and the latest design trends, or you haven’t updated your website code in years, this is article will explain why it’s important you structure your data properly utilizing semantic standards.

There are a number of ways to structure your data to make it more relevant to search engines, as well as social media sites. As an e-commerce retailer it is important to understand which of these standards you should consider including in your website. You should take some time to ensure you are implementing semantic markup, and doing it correctly. It has the power to better inform potential customers with upfront knowledge prior to landing on your site. Customers can see product reviews, pricing and stock information, and even images before clicking through to your website. This can lead to increased click-through rates, improve conversions, and generally enhance your SEO objectives.

Read more

Derrick Harris reports that DataPop, an LA-based startup that uses Big Data to deliver custom online ads has raised $7 million in Series B funding. Harris states, “The company’s technology uses big data techniques such as natural-language processing and semantic association to automatically generate online ads based on what a web user has searched for. Essentially, the DataPop service works like this: DataPop gathers information on products, services, promotions and other relevant  data from customer web sites; it then automatically presents ads for those products, etc., when someone searches for something related on Google or Microsoft; the ads appear as if a human wrote them, not just a collection of keywords.” Read more

Jason Del Rey of Ad Age reports, “DG, a traditional-TV ad delivery company that moved into the online-ad space with last year’s acquisition of MediaMind, has acquired semantic ad-targeting startup Peer39 in a deal that could reach $15.5 million in cash and stock. Peer39, which is based in New York City, will get $10 million up front in addition to approximately 357,000 shares of DG stock. The acquisition also includes a $2.3 million earn out.” Read our previous coverage of Peer39 here. Read more

Google has announced two updates to rich snippets, the enhanced format that they announced in 2009 for displaying content in search results that use semantic markup.

The first update addresses an issue raised on answers.semanticweb.com in July of 2011. Prior to this update, only some places in the world saw rich snippets in their local results. Now product rich snippets is getting global support, meaning that users worldwide will be able to preview product information in the rich snippet. Here is an example from www.google.fr:

Read more

Rohn Jay Miller of SocialMediaToday recently wrote about the challenge of measuring social influence through Big Data. Miller writes, “How big a challenge is measuring social influence online? The answer lies in why we’re asking the question. Do we want to know whom influences whom in what ways to get people to buy a certain car, or vote for a certain political candidate? If that’s the case we’re in for a wild ride because the psychology of individual choice is wide, deep and rich. We can understand social influence in its correlations—when certain influencers say something we can see a correlated set of responses occurring. But correlation isn’t the same as causality. Proving causality means you can specifically attribute when certain influencers say something it causes the following responses. This is not measurement, its attribution. And attribution is the real proof of social influence.” Read more

Semantic ad targeting and brand protection is diving deeper into the online video category. That’s one result of a new deal for React2Media to represent ad pepper media’s display products and services, iSense, SiteScreen and the real-time bidding platform adEXplorer, in the U.S.

iSense is based on Crystal’s Sense Engine semantic analysis technology for supporting content targeting of display advertising, while SiteScreen keeps ads away from objectionable content. Check out this article and this one for more details on how the semantic targeting and protection suites work, and this one for information on the adEXplorer platform that will be integrated into Act2, React2Media’s video ad network. adEXplorer incorporates the precise page-level targeting and brand safety filtering of the iSense and SiteScreen technologies.

Many web sites today, including YouTube and Yahoo Network, operate on the pre-roll model, where embedded video players run an ad in advance of the video that users are waiting to see. React2Media takes the tack that web sites need not have embedded video players, so “you don’t have to be married to the small amount of web sites that have one,” says COO Jordan Galbraith. Its technology also allows, while the video ad plays in the banner, for an expandable companion ad running on the side with more details.

With the ad pepper relationship, “now we can offer ads in a banner across any web site in the world and can match content on the page with the content of our advertising,” in real-time, he says. “We’re one of the first to target page level content to video ads.” That level of dynamism is a switch from manual site-specific media buy approaches.

Read more

Precision Health Media has raised $1 million in venture capital with the company’s Condition Match contextual advertising technology. The company also named Matthew Fink of Johnson and Johnson the company’s first Vice President of Marketing. According to the release, ” Fink joins PHM from J&J, where he was most recently Integrated Marketing Manager. While at J&J, he worked across some of the company’s largest brands, including Johnson’s Baby, Rogaine and K-Y, in a variety of marketing strategy and product development roles, helping to drive growth through innovative platforms and programs.” Read more

Twitter has sold its old tweets to DataSift, a company that plans to analyze the tweets for marketing purposes. DataSift is the first company to get access to these tweets which go back two years. According to one article, DataSift has “launched a product called DataSift Historics, which lets companies extract insights and trends that relate to brands, businesses, financial markets, news and public opinion, a rep says. DataSift will analyze public tweets, not private ones. If you delete a tweet, it’s deleted from DataSift’s archives.” Read more

The Open Graph protocol continues to progress: Earlier this week Facebook’s Director of Developer Relations Douglas Purdy talked about its intersection with the mobile web.

According to Purdy, more people are accessing Facebook on the mobile web than from its top native apps combined, and the game is on to help developers conquer the challenges of building for that community. One of those challenges is app discovery. At the Mobile World Congress on Monday, the company announced that it’s continuing to address the first issue with plans to extend to native Android apps the ability for Facebook’s 425 million mobile app users to discover them through Open Graph connections.

Read more