The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism State of the News Media 2012 report was just published, and among the findings is that efforts by most top news sites to monetize the web in their own right are still limited. Few news companies, it reports, “have made much progress in some key new digital areas. Among the top news websites, there is little use of the digital advertising that is expected to grow most rapidly, so-called “smart,” or targeted, advertising.”

Failing to make a lot more hay from digital ads is problematic for traditional news companies given the decline in print circulation and in its ad revenue, too. The report says that in 2011, losses in print advertising dollars outpaced gains in digital revenue by a factor of roughly 10 to 1, which it calls an even worse ratio than in 2010.

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

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

The mobile ad space gets more and more interesting. Reports indicate that LinkedIn will be launching mobile advertisements as early as March, based on a statement by CEO Jeff Weiner during its quarterly earnings call that there are plans to monetize page views in “the mobile environment.” How much, if any, of that will be semantic-influenced is unknown, though it’s worth noting that LinkedIn has discussed its use of microformats in the past, such as hCard and hResume, and offered that it would be experimenting with RDF and FoaF.

And Facebook is hip to being in the mobile ad mix, too, acknowledging amid the IPO flurry that a weakness it had was monetizing its mobile user base. The Financial Times reported that it’s been in discussion with ad agencies about displaying sponsored “featured stories” in mobile users’ news feeds as well as to desktop users (see more about that and its intersection with the Open Graph protocol here).

Clearly, mobility matters to online advertising, and to semantically-minded players in the market. NetSeer has been on that bandwagon, for example, mobilizing its concept-based advertising through its relationship with Mobile Theory. Our friends in the Nordic region also have the semantic targeting capabilities that come along with ad serving technology from Emediate, an independent company that’s owned by ad pepper media International and provides web publishers with a system for managing, targeting and forecasting digital ads, including in the mobile space.

Now there’s news today from Twelvefold Media (formerly BuzzLogic) about the launch of Spectrum for Mobile, which takes its online targeting capabilities to the iOS and Android platforms. Spectrum is the company’s system for providing in real-time emotive-based ads by analyzing and understanding the content on individual pages (for further insight into how it works, see this story).

Read more

Image Courtesy: Flickr/substack

A new report from the Institute for Global Futures, Global Futures Forecast 2012, lays out the top trends that it believes will shape the coming year. It’s looking ahead to a future that it says may be characterized by complex trends, accelerated change, hyper-competition, disruption, innovation and uncertainty, and that will demand a new way of operating.

It recommends continuing investment in innovation in the U.S., as that is the central driver of US and global competitive advantage, and a requirement for achieving more stable growth. And it advises that organizations’ leaders need to do a better job becoming long-range thinkers given that the accelerated pace of change means that the future is coming at us faster than ever before, and with change comes risk.

What do such things have to do with the Semantic Web and semantic technologies? Apparently, quite a lot.

Read more

uma has announced a new instillation of their product, uma SKIN (Semantic Knowledge Information Network). According to a release, the company has installed SKIN “at Bally’s presentation of its Autumn/Winter 2012 men’s collection in Milan, which was unveiled to the press on Sunday, January 15th. The 2.5 meter multi-user multitouch wall, integrated in the Scribe Made to Order showroom concept, presents an interactive World of Bally that enabled users to access custom curated content, as well as Bally’s innovative Scribe Configurator App.” Read more

Vertical Search Works has launched a new semantic search and advertising platform for foodies, VS4Food – a search widget for publishers. The Ardent Epicure is among several food websites that are already using the widget. According to the release, “VS4Food is a vertical search engine that resides on a publisher’s site.  Users can enter a query without leaving the site through a toolbar, and the search engine returns results from both the publisher and from other web sites relevant to the query. VS4Food automatically organizes results into facets, relevant categories associated with the query. For example, searching for ‘sirloin steak’ will classify documents in categories about grilling recipes and wine pairings. Similarly, a search for ‘Emeril dessert’ will return categories such as cooking show, dessert recipe and cookbooks.” Read more

Semantic advertising web service ADmantX has announced a partnership with adBrite, “the largest independent ad exchange, to offer brand safety, greater ad engagement and page-level, cookie-less targeting to advertisers and publishers.” The article states, “In today’s complex and rapidly evolving online advertising landscape, audience targeting is at the heart of any attempt to maximize online ad effectiveness. Semantic-based analysis and dynamic categorization provided by ADmantX will now be available through adBrite, allowing them to leverage the combination of emotional intelligence and contextual and semantic targeting in real time.” Read more

Kevin Fitchard recently asked the question, “Is Google scared of Siri? Is Yelp? Is Facebook? If they aren’t they should be, as should any mobile website, service or app that depends on advertising for revenues. Siri is just the beginning of a new wave of user interfaces (UIs) that will gradually shift our attention away from our phones’ screens, allowing us to interact with our devices in ways that don’t involve tapping keys and staring at pixels.” Read more

A new article reports, “VigLink, which turns outbound links on published stories into monetization opportunities, has expanded on its service by automating the insertion of links on keywords that could become a revenue generator for publishers… VigLink will hyperlink keywords in the content and will direct the reader to a place where they can buy a product. So, if you’re writing about the Apple iPhone or a book on Amazon, the word ‘iPhone,’ or the book title, would be automatically hyperlinked to Apple or Amazon, whereby a reader can buy a product. VigLink takes roughly 25% of the affiliate fee paid out by partners, Apple or Amazon, and the publisher gets the remainder. Typically, Amazon pays Viglink about 8.5% of products sold vs. 4.5% paid out to sites with low traffic.” Read more