Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Last month, The Washington Times became the latest media outlet to start using the services of four-year-old Inform Technologies. The newspaper said it was using Inform’s semantic web product to create topic-specific pages about significant news and newsmakers, power its Dig Deeper feature that helps readers find related themes and related stories, and link its video and multimedia content to articles throughout the site.

Inform Technologies also counts among its customers the Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, the NY Daily News, CNN, and a number of other publishing sites.

To CEO James Satloff, a list of such clients paying to use its technology makes Inform the standard in the industry.

“By having so many different authoritative media use your technology for disambiguation and categorization and textual relevance, that’s how you get to be the standard,” he says.

What Inform does for its clients, from established media sources to start-up bloggers, are four main things, Satloff says. The technology saves them money by providing consistent industry standard tagging of content; compels users to spend longer on a publisher’s site; attracts new unique visitors; and helps them monetize their digital assets.

Journalists spend between 12 and 17 minutes per story hand-tagging content, Satloff says — and they hate it.

“If you spend just 15 minutes doing this per story and you pub 100 stories a day that’s 500 man-days a year of just tagging,” he says. With Inform, writers or editors can submit their text and in 200ms get back tagged articles based on what Satloff says is a “phenomenally deep and rich ontology.”

And Inform offers this part of its services for free, in the interests that better and more consistent tagging across the web is good for the publishers, the industry, and of course, for Inform, too.

By surfacing valuable contextual links and extracting related topics based on its real-time “reading” of the article, Inform makes it easier for readers to dive further into a publication’s digital assets, keeping them on the site longer by pushing them deeper into areas they didn’t know they wanted to go. Take, for example, an article on Bristol Palin, the daughter of vice presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin. In addition to creating automatic links within the text, it extracts related contextually related topics that might be of interest to people reading the article, even if those words don’t actually appear in the text — stories on childbirth, for instance.

Inform can also automatically create topic pages that can raise a site’s profile on the search engines, and with new visitors, by bolstering its credentials as an authority on a particular area. For instance, a story about the current crisis in the financials market ties nicely contextually to a topic page of articles the publication has done on Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

“Like beachfront property, those topics pages are valuable from a user engagement perspective,” says Satloff — visitors go to those pages because they are specifically interested in the area, not because they got there by accident.. “And that’s brand new real estate that ads can be sold on. Topic pages create a tremendous increase in the volume of pages that exist for the publisher — some 20 or 30%. And since we know with such precision all the topics that story is about, it’s an easy way to pass contextual hints to ad partners for better monetization.”

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