Online publishers and other content providers have a new analytics tool to help them understand what their readers care about and use that information to better connect them to their sites’ relevant and compelling content. Launching today is Dash, based on the predictive content analytics platform Parse.ly. The technology crawls every article page for Parse.ly’s publisher-partners, and analyzes, in real time and at scale, the text to identify relevant topics to group related content together. Behind this lies natural language processing technology, which uses language queues hidden inside the text to determine its affiliated topics. To date Dash has extracted over 350,000 unique topics through all the URLs is has crawled during private beta for a healthy taxonomy of topics across the web being consumed by users.

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Announcing Semantic Tech & Business Conference - San Francisco 2012

Semantic Tech & Business Conference is returning to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!

iXiGO, a travel meta search engine has launched a new flight search tool for Facebook and Twitter that utilizes natural language processing. According to an article by Anupam Saxena, “Users can directly post a query on iXiGO’s Facebook page or make a twitter mention to @iXiGOsearch with the query. iXiGO says that it will reply to the user with a comment on his query with details of the cheapest flight found across multiple travel sites, a link to the relevant iXiGO.com result page where the user can filter the results by time, stops, price and other factors, as well as a direct booking link for booking the cheapest flight on the travel site where it is available.” Read more

Our own Jennifer Zaino recently shared the story of two developers turning to the semantic web to create a social democracy platform for global protesters. The effort is called Tribeforth Foundation’s Project 99. In a parallel effort, Ed Knutson and the Federated General Assembly are at work on their own social networking platform for protesters. Trent Nouveau reports, “Activists associated with the rapidly evolving OccupyWallStreet (OWS) movement have kicked off an initiative to redefine social networking for a new age of global protest. According to web and mobile app developer Ed Knutson, the new tech could go well beyond OWS to help create more distributed social networks, optimize online business collaboration and perhaps even help make the concept of a semantic web a reality.” Read more

From Dropbox to Google Docs, cloud applications are increasingly becoming a part of business users’ everyday productivity toolbox. Hojoki – taken from the name of an old Japanese book about the way of life and the flow of events – aims to aggregate those cloud apps into a Facebook-like activity feed, underpinned by semantic technology.

“We really think the real pain point up to now is that work and communication about work are separated,” says Martin Böhringer, co-founder and CEO. “We integrate the productivity apps that people already are using so that they show up in the stream” where people are communicating.

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Karen Hanna recently informed business analysts about a few things they should know about Facebook Timeline. Hanna writes, “The “old” Facebook profile shows a user’s posts in order from new to old, and information such as photos and videos are organized in a tabular fashion. Timeline is a broader, more visual view of each user, where updates may be highlighted for their importance. Users may also “fill in the blanks” to include significant past events. Users can potentially provide a lot more content, something that is of interest to advertisers and businesses.” Read more

StreamGlider, which we first covered here, made its debut yesterday. The iPad news and social reader application in its initial version debuts sans the location-aware and some of the more heavy-duty semantic topic stream smarts discussed in that piece, but newly named StreamGlider Inc. CEO Bill McDaniel – also CEO of SemantiStar, which developed the application – says to expect them in updates beginning in March. McDaniel is partners in StreamGlider with co-founder Nova Spivack, also CEO of Bottlenose among other pursuits, and co-founder John Breslin, DERI researcher, NUI Galway lecturer,  and founder of New Tech Post.

What’s in the current version that McDaniel says differentiates the software from other iPad news reader apps like Pulse and Flipboard are real-time news streams composed of mixed media – sources such as RSS, YouTube, Flickr, Google Reader, Twitter, and Facebook – so you can see news items, images, video, social media updates and more about particular content of interest, any way you like in a stream. “You can put them all together in a single stream so you can build streams to be more topic-oriented,” McDaniel says.

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CitizenNet is using semantic analysis and natural language processing to provide customers with automatic social media promotion. Erik Sass reports, “The advent of new Facebook analytics and programming tools, especially Insights and related APIs, is enabling marketers and technology providers to automate many aspects of social media marketing that were previously labor-intensive to the point of being prohibitive or just depressing. In one recent example, LA-based startup CitizenNet has launched an ‘Automatic Social Promote’ service which integrates Facebook’s Insights API and Ads API, allowing marketers to automatically identify and propagate their most engaging social content on Facebook.” Read more

Facebook today posted that users now officially can upgrade their profiles to its Facebook Timeline by heading here. Timeline, as Mark Zuckerberg described in September, is Facebook’s way of helping uses curate the stories of their lives, calling out the most meaningful events and recent highlights. During the F8 Developers’ Conference, he said that Facebook had “rethought from the ground up the heart of the Facebook experience.”

The Open Graph protocol, based on RDFa, provides power to the experience, enabling applications to focus on filling out user Timelines with lightweight activities, and on discovering new things through friends in what Zuckerberg at the time called a frictionless experience. As an example, he noted the debut of the Open Graph Spotify music app that adds to a user’s Timeline the songs she listens to, radio stations, and albums.

Other Open Graph app launch partners announced at the event in the fall were The Daily, Dailymotion, Earbits, The Guardian, Hulu, iHeartRadio, The Independent, Izlesene, Jelli, My Video, Netflix, Rdio, Slacker, Songza, The Washington Post, and Yahoo. Others, such as The Huffington Post, joined later. In late November, Facebook said that the publishers building social news apps to help users see what their friends or reading or to view past top articles are seeing good early results.

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It’s the Day of the Dolphin. Bottlenose (previously known as Bottleno.se), which we initially covered here, moves out of stealth and into private beta mode. The service lassoes your Twitter, Facebook and Yammer streams, and drives real-time understanding and surfacing of personally relevant content so that you don’t have to read everything (not that you ever could!). It debuts with a new architecture for leveraging “crowd computing” for enabling scale and for creating more and more “semantic stream” smarts around the flood of information on social networks.

Nova Spivack and co-founder and CTO Dominiek ter Heide (formerly CTO of Cerego Japan who has long been tackling the issue of distilling interest profiles behind social streams) are the minds behind the service. Spivack has essentially referred to Bottlenose as everything, and more, that Twitter Annotations never was.

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A new article asks, “How stable is China? What are people discussing and thinking in Pakistan? To answer these sorts of questions, the U.S. government has turned to a rich source: social media… The CIA maintains a social-media tracking center operated out of a nondescript building in a Virginia industrial park. The intelligence analysts at the agency’s Open Source Center, who other agents refer to as ‘vengeful librarians,’ are tasked with sifting through millions of tweets, Facebook messages, online chat logs, and other public data on the World Wide Web to glean insights into the collective moods of regions or groups abroad.” Read more