Market Strategies International recently released the first edition of what it says will be an annual Social Media Brand Index, a measure for brands both of consumer-generated social media about them and of their own sponsored content. The Index takes into account four components. Volume, or the amount of buzz about a brand online, is one of them — and its most highly weighted component, too. The others take their cue from what we might call more meaning-related measures, sentiment analytics and semantic markup among them.

For example, there’s net Sentiment, which Market Strategies says represents the ratio of positive to negative sentiments expressed about a brand based on automated natural language processing of the content of posts, comments and mentions. Another component, Positive Emotions, seems to flow from that measure, representing the number of content items that are identified as having the warm fuzzies about them, again based on automated coding of content.

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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 !

Amazon Web Services is now offering CloudSearch as a paid service. The official AWS announcement states, “Continuing along in our quest to give you the tools that you need to build ridiculously powerful web sites and applications in no time flat at the lowest possible cost, I’d like to introduce you to Amazon CloudSearch. If you have ever searched Amazon.com, you’ve already used the technology that underlies CloudSearch. You can now have a very powerful and scalable search system (indexing and retrieval) up and running in less than an hour.” Read more

A new matchmaking app from one of the founders of Adaptive Semantics hit Facebook yesterday. Adaptive Semantics, you may recall, developed the JuLiA semantic text-parsing technology that’s now part of AOL’s toolkit, courtesy of its Huffington Post acquisition.

Kingfish Labs is the startup that created Yoke, and it includes Jeff Revesz as CTO. Rob Fishman, who was Huffington Post’s social media editor, is the CEO of the company, which recently received $500,000 in seed funding. Yoke’s take on the online dating scene is to bring people together with the help of an ontology graph: Its algorithms explore entities, the connections between them, and the strength of those connections to discover common interests between people that just might lead to a real-world bond.

Yoke is deeply connected into the Facebook API, Revesz says. With users’ permission, it accesses basic data such as birthday, location, and education history, and also pulls their Likes in music, bands, artists, movies, books and some general areas outside those categories. Ditto for their closest friends (again, with respect to their privacy settings, so no guarantee as to how far it can get for each individual). Behind the scenes, Yoke mashes up its Facebook Graph data with data from Amazon, Netflix, and Echonest (which powers Spotify radio) to produce an ontology of interest entities for connecting users together. These three sources were chosen, Revesz says, because they’re the easiest to work with, the biggest and the best.

“We’re looking both for similarity information and ontology information,” he explains – that is, for example, how closely two movies might resemble each other, and what entities they might share in common, such as the same director or actors. So, if someone likes one particular movie, the ontology of interest entities can be used to show other people who like similar things.

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The Common Crawl Foundation’s repository of openly and freely accessible web crawl data is about to go live as a Public Data Set on Amazon Web Services.  The non-profit Common Crawl is the vision of Gil Elbaz, who founded Applied Semantics and the AdSense technology for which Google acquired it , as well as the Factual open data aggregation platform, and it counts Nova Spivack  — who’s been behind semantic services from Twine to Bottlenose – among its board of directors.

Elbaz’ goal in developing the repository: “You can’t access, let alone download, the Google or the Bing crawl data. So certainly we’re differentiated in being very open and transparent about what we’re crawling and actually making it available to developers,” he says.

“You might ask why is it going to be revolutionary to allow many more engineers and researchers and developers and students access to this data, whereas historically you have to work for one of the big search engines…. The question is, the world has the largest-ever corpus of knowledge out there on the web, and is there more that one can do with it than Google and Microsoft and a handful of other search engines are already doing? And the answer is unquestionably yes. ”

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Frederick Giasson recently shared his experiences running the Open Semantic Framework on a Micro Instance. Giasson explains, “After releasing the new Open Semantic Framework Installer, we started to test it on machines with all kind of different specifications: different CPU limits, different amount of memory, etc. One of the setup that caught our attention was Amazon’s EC2 Micro Instance. The Micro Instance is a virtual server type that has been introduced by Amazon a little bit more than a year ago.” 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

Online advertising that leverages semantic technology is expanding to the do-it-yourself model. Infolinks today is launching its self-service in-text advertising marketplace. The company says the service is designed to speed advertisers’ ability to create in-text ad campaigns, which work in the Infolinks method by revealing ads to consumers when they hover over a highlighted keyword in relevant content and opt in to see the spot on the advertiser’s landing page.

Infolinks already delivers in-text advertising campaigns across 250 billion pages of content in its network of pre-screened web sites that it says reach over 350 million unique visitors. The company says that network consists of more than 50,000 online publishers and blogging sites.

Its full page textual analysis “relies on natural language processing, machine learning and other proprietary linguistics technologies to ensure that ads are contextually relevant to the publisher’s content and what visitors are reading at any time,” says chief marketing officer Tomer Treves, as well as to avoid inappropriate brand associations.

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eBooks are cool, but they could get even cooler with EPUB3, the next version of the widely adopted distribution and interchange format for digital books (well, except for Amazon). The latest version of the standard could make it easier for publishers to more flexibly represent their offerings to digital book retailers, and add a lot of excitement to the eBook reading experience, too.

EPUB3 is based on HTML 5 and was proposed to include RDFa. RDFa is in question for eBook metadata now, however, though there is still the possibility to embed RDF/OWL within eBook content. (Membership comments on EPUB3 are due in by Aug. 22). EPUB 3 requires the same three metadata elements as EPUB 2, which are dc:identifier, dc:title, and dc:language, while also permitting many more. “We left it open to using something like RDFa so you can put in what you need to,” says Eric Freese, solutions architect at digital publishing solutions vendor Aptara. That could include, for example, using the PRISM (Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata) XML metadata vocabulary for managing and aggregating publishing content, or ONIX metadata for representing and communicating book industry product information.

However the RDFa question fares, one thing that is increasingly clear to publishers that have done any looking at all into eBooks, Freese says, is that “it doesn’t take long before they get hit in the face with the metadata problem. And as more time goes by there are fewer and fewer publishers who haven’t thought about doing eBooks.”

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What does it mean for a tablet to have a Semantic Web inspired user interface (UI)? Following the launch of the Grid 10 from Fusion Garage – erstwhile known as Tabco in the lead-up campaign to its debut – we’re still not sure.

Brought to you by the same company that tried to make a splash with the JooJoo tablet a couple of years back, the Grid 10 aims to address complaints that were leveled around that failed product, such as being unintuitive and lacking apps. And to show good faith with those who bought the first device, Fusion Garage CEO and founder Chandrashekar Rathakrishnan said those folks can expect emails offering them the Grid 10 for free.

Fusion Garage is making its play not to conquer Apple but to be a real competitor to it, which Rathakrishnan said has been lacking given the me-too sameness of every other player in the mobile device market. He talked about the tablet’s operating system being built to leverage the Android kernel – while emphasizing that “this isn’t Android, though – it is Grid.”

Here’s where one might have thought to hear more about its having semantic technology behind it as a distinguishing characteristic, but the word semantic wasn’t uttered once by Rathakrishnan in his introduction or demo of the Grid 10 today, nor in regard to the Grid for SmartPhone that he introduced as well.

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A recent article reports, “In April, Walmart dropped $300 million on social media startup Kosmix to compete against Amazon with @WalmartLabs. Specifically, the retailer was targeting Anand Rajaraman, 38, and Venky Harinarayan, 44, who founded Kosmix, the creator of TweetBeat. The Stanford grads also founded Junglee, an e-commerce company that Amazon bought back in 1998 for more than $250 million (where they then worked for two years, building its marketplace division).” Read more