A new article reports, “eBay is the latest tech giant to embrace Drupal, the open source content management system that now runs an estimated 2 percent of all websites on the planet. As eBay formally launched its new X.commerce business unit — a sweeping effort to bridge the worlds of online and offline payments — the company revealed it had moved the unit’s X.com website to Drupal, dropping the proprietary Jive Software platform the site previously used. ‘We found that Drupal offers more tools and does so faster,’ Neal Sample, chief technology officer of open commerce at eBay” stated. Read more

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 !

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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What’s the most important requirement for sentiment analytics to succeed? Make that question plural, and let’s start our answers with something that the tools in this area themselves have no influence on: Good quality data.

During yesterday’s second annual Sentiment Analysis Symposium in New York City, hosted by Alta Plana Corp. and its founder Seth Grimes, the audience got an earful about how bad data can negatively impact efforts to understand sentiment  before they even get underway.

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Back when I was an industry analyst (VP, E-Business Strategies at the META Group, since acquired by Gartner), I often had to critique emerging markets.  Unlike venture capitalists, industry analysts are privy to product roadmaps from publicly-traded companies, including the industry giants (Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, IBM).  And unlike i-bankers, they are privy to product roadmaps from start-ups.  And as a kicker, some analysts (actually, only those with the largest firms; back then, primarily limited to those analysts with Gartner, Forrester, META and Giga) get a lot of great feedback from CIOs and other end users.

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In a recent blog post, Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, wrote about a new paradigm. In the early days of the internet it was the computers and the wires that were important; more recently it was the documents that were the important things, the centres of focus and attention. Now, and in the future, “it’s the things they are about which are important.” Tim refers to this as the Graph, to distinguish it from the Web, and also to distinguish it from social network sites that contain a subset of a representation of a Graph, but are not the Graph. Tim also identifies the Graph with the Semantic Web: being a way to express the relationships between things sitting above the level of documents.

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