Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

The newspaper publishing industry is facing some challenges on both sides of the Atlantic. Just ask Martijn Wuite, Internet manager at Dutch newspaper Het Parool:

“The state of the Dutch newspaper industry is tense at the moment with a major takeover taking place, the expected redundancies and national print advertising revenues under pressure,” he says. “It is important to increase readership by new methods to raise traffic for a publisher’s network to improve online advertising revenues and always market your content and brand.”

So the publication, with a readership of 89,000, has turned to f»dforward (pronounced ‘feedforward’), a widget-based recommendation engine from Kimengi that lets the online version of the paper connect with blogs and other sources and incorporates social elements.

The newspaper is taking the opposite approach of creating a walled garden of content and reader lock-in, with the goal of becoming part of the ongoing conversation online rather than risk being left out of it. To that end, there’s a need to help connect readers with other content that may be directly related to a particular article they’re already reading or otherwise tailored to pique their interest, Wuite notes in an email interview.

“When you want to be relevant, a site or blog should offer relevant content which can be on topic, but also can be based on topics of personal interest, not directly related to the initial topic in mind,” Wuite says.

f»dforward attempts to accomplish that, enabling lateral linking through a combination of semantic web technologies, social media connections, and the read/write web.

“In the beginning stage of the web, people could surf around and go to different topics based on context and interests and using writers of web sites who provided hyperlinks,” says Lucien Burm, CEO and co-founder of Kimengi. “But with the scale of the web today it’s been virtually impossible for a publisher to link to everything.”

Recommendations in real time

F»dforward provides a semantic technology element for connecting all kinds of topics, pages or parts of pages or whole web sites together where there is similarity or complementary content. It uses knowledge of readers’ social web connections (authorized by the user, of course) to understand their interests, what experts they follow online, and the like, as well as takes into account that a reader might also be a writer (blogs, twitters, etc.) in their own right, with an eye to what their writing reveals about their tastes. Then it uses this information to help content publishers deliver in real time recommendations matched to that individual, either from within that publisher’s own content or the network-at-large of content creators who are part of the f»dforward network.

“We are not indexing the whole web and trying to provide that structured data,” says Burm. “We have web sites like publishers who grow the network. They connect with other web sites and through these three technologies we try to make connections among them for people.”

Wuite says Het Parool has luckily seen a lot of growth in the last year, even amid the industry’s difficulties. Het Parool Digital in June 2008 switched to a modern publishing platform that gave it the ability to roll out the Parool.nl news site, Ondergrond.tv videoblog, a jobs section, events guide, and a mobile news site, among other things, with new features such as the Parool videosite, Parool.tv, coming up in August.

“The decision to start using f>>dforward has to do a lot with our open mentality towards new developments and the fact that most of us work here on the verge of content and tech for more than 10 years now, so we like to trial and error new functionalities and features on our website,” Wuite says. It’s been testing f»dforward “under the hood” for some time, officially launching it last week on the site. “The network that f>>dforward has obtained is the potential of titles that can be recommended and suggested automatically,” he says.

Given that it’s only been live for about a week, he isn’t surprised that users seem to need a little bit of time to get used to it, because they don’t see it yet as classic recommendations where they might be expecting topic relevance alone. “However, once they get a little bit more accustomed to the suggestions, you notice a higher acceptance of the broadened suggested topics, which in the end are based on the user’s online trail he or she leaves behind,” Wuite says.

Burm expects publishers like Het Parool to see some very direct returns from deploying technology such as f>>dforward. “It will drive traffic across the network and sub networks… because of the semantic and social connections. That increases readership and that means the advertising model will run a little better,” he says. That, in turn, could push advertisers further along not just in valuing online advertising-but in paying rates that support that value.

“This is one of the factors that could help online content to become more valuable in general than it is right now,” says Wuite. “If in general advertising is the only model that’s supporting content publishing online, the value of this online combination must increase a lot for titles some way or another, or some (news) sites and blogs will evaporate in the long run. Tools like f>>dforward could provide a broader and more surprising content offering to the reader, just like a newspaper in general does.”

One way content could become more valuable with f>>dforward is using its social analytics capability to better understand not only what is and isn’t getting traction on a publisher’s web site, but also what people might be reading elsewhere that the publisher should get in on.

“In the long run it could say there’s a group in your audience that is very interested in [a particular] kind of topic. We use semantic technologies for that,” says Burm. “So maybe it’s interesting for you [as the publisher] to create your own title in that cluster or work with another blog that serves that community.” In fact, Het Parool is already in talks with some sports communities to start working together on co-produced content and sharing their networks, Wuite says.

Measuring traffic is at the very heart of Het Parool’s daily operations, Wuite says. “The first cautious analysis shows that users jump from, for example a sports blog towards fashion topics on our site, and an economy article on Microsoft was read twice as much as normally thanks to the tech blogs in the recommendation network,” he says. “It will clearly show which categories we can or must emphasize on more. [But] we can’t forget the broader content spectrum we offer, because as a newspaper website people expect us to do this, unlike the niche audience most of the blogs serve.”

Currently the technology supports both English and Dutch, and Kimengi is working on adding support for the other main European languages. At some point the vendor may build in support for cross-language recommendations among network providers’ content. The widget is currently freely available to any content provider that would like to join the network and deploy the technology.

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