Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Web page personalization and web links enrichment solution MashLogic this month demonstrated one form of its slogan, “Take Back the Web,” with a partnership with NewsCred. It used NewsCred’s upcoming API to deliver to users a topic pages summary mash of the breaking news they are interested in on any page on any site they are browsing.

Boasting semantic smarts, web services, and social integration, MashLogic is an add-on for Firefox and IE browsers that’s aiming at helping users gain back control of their hyperlinks.

“The general idea when the web was visualized was that connectivity was based on links,” says MashLogic co-founder and VP Ranjit Padmanabhan.

But at some point, with the proliferation of data, search engines took on the middleman navigation role, and publishers began changing links to influence and game them, leading to a loss of control by users, he says. How MashLogic gets that control back, he says, is by enabling users to specify the kinds of things they are interested in, whether it’s baseball or movies, and as they browse anywhere around the web the add-on automatically adds links that correspond to those topics of interest.

For example, a name of a baseball player may appear on a gossip site. If you have indicated an interest in baseball, then mousing over that player’s name might pull up their stats or other information or headlines of interest.

“The end result of using MashLogic is that you see more links that correspond to what you indicated are your interests. It adds a richer context around what you’re looking at,” says Padmanabhan. It’s enabling that contextual richness using a collection of entity extraction, natural language processing, and various other semantic technologies, with support for a couple dozen entity types that include person, place, and company.

It draws its information from sources such as Wikipedia, Major League baseball’s data set, and now sites like NewsCred. Other mash feeds include Twitter, which discovers trending Twitter topics and @names on web pages and links these to recent tweets and user profiles, and Kosmix Topics, where entities on web pages are linked to related topics — such as band member links when you mouse over a band’s name. Information is updated on an as-needed basis — baseball stats daily, for instance, and news items every few hours.

Right now what users mostly get are immediate incremental benefits of having a bit better knowledge on a topic they are interested in as they read. But the company wants to further extend the offering to include entity relationships to published sources, and to be a platform so that anyone interested can create their own mashes and distribute them to friends via social networks — for example, extracting references to entities such as heavy metal 1980s’ British rock bands.

“The goal eventually is to let people build up their own personal library of pages and topics, so you can have your own personal index of stuff you care about,” Padmanabhan says. It’s also exploring mashes related to geocoding, so that as users mouse over the names of places they can see maps and other data t provide a richer geographical experience.

Bloggers and publishers can use the tool as well, to help syndicate their content more widely, programming their RSS feeds into MashLogic so that their content integrates more seamlessly into the browsing experience rather than making the user go to the work of firing up their RSS feeds to read content. All bloggers all publishers need do is put a MashFeed badge on their blogs and people can click on and subscribe to it.

Believers in the technology include angel investors venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners, About.com founder Scott, Kurnit, and Wikia CEO Gil Penchina. MashLogic has raised a half million dollars in an angel round from investors that include these names. MashLogic is following the affiliate revenue model, collecting commissions when users click through from the links to books or merchandise associated with the topics they are interested in.

“Everyone, regardless of your stand on advertising, is a consumer, so based on your motivation and interest we show you only the relevant stuff,” says Padmanabhan.

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