Julianne Pepitone of CNN Money reports, “The social TV space has been percolating for the past year or two, and its first big merger is here: startup GetGlue has been acquired by lesser-known Viggle. Viggle will buy GetGlue for $25 million in cash and about 48.3 million shares of the company’s publicly traded stock, worth around $53 million at Friday’s closing price. Viggle will run both brands and continue to employ GetGlue’s 34 employees. GetGlue founder and CEO Alex Iskold will take a senior executive position and a board seat at Viggle. Social TV software — also known as “second screen” apps or even the clunky phrase “simultaneous viewing” tools — taps into TV viewers’ use of mobile devices while they watch their favorite shows. More than a dozen startups have popped up to take advantage of the trend, with each platform taking a slightly different approach.” Read more

Photo credit: Flickr/Erwiss, peace&love

It’s that spooky time of year again. With a happy Halloween to all, we present a selection of Halloween entertainment to dive into between answering the door for trick-or-treaters, or whenever you might like to have a little scarefest. They all come courtesy of searches done on some of the web’s semantically-enabled platforms.

Movies, from Jinni.com:

A search on Jinni, the semantic movie and TV “taste engine” that we first covered here, for “serial killer” theme, set in the 20^th century in small towns, brings up some classics in the list of 41 that’s displayed, as well as some you may have missed when originally shown in theatres. Some in the list:

Halloween (of course): The 1978 John Carpenter-directed classic that started Jamie Lee Curtis on her fright-girl career (long before the yogurt days).  As a line in the summary says, the film “turned the slasher movie into a viable, successful genre. Halloween has been copied, parodied and even turned into a franchise of its own, but the original is still considered the best of the bunch.”

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If you’re a sucker for the semantic web and the romantic royal wedding, heads up: AdaptiveBlue’s GetGlue entertainment social network has a deal with CNN around coverage of Kate and Will’s Big Day.

According to the site’s blog, CNN viewers can earn stickers all week for watching Anderson Cooper 360° and other special coverage of  the Royal Wedding. They can check-in to  AC360° and CNN’s other series through GetGlue’s apps or its website.

Other TV coverage sites from which to earn stickers — which let you rate as a recognized fan on a particular topic — include:

• Westminster Abbey with CNN’s Piers Morgan
• Hyde Park with CNN’s Kiran Chetry
• Buckingham Palace with CNN’s Anderson Cooper
• CNN Royal Wedding, and
• Imperial State Crown. That will be the fifth and final sticker awarded to users who obtain each of CNN’s other Royal Wedding stickers.

Stickers began being awarded at the start of the week, but there’s still time to catch up.

As a refresher, AdaptiveBlue maintains a semantic database of objects across the web, so it knows that a certain tv show, for instance, is a specific object wherever it appears on connected web sites. So, when you check in that you’re involved in it, you are checking into that as a singular object on the web.

By the way, you may want to check out TVNewser for live online coverage of the big event tomorrow.

Image Courtesy: Flickr/Lori Greig

It doesn’t matter whether this month you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, the Winter Solstice, or anything else. In December, most everyone’s thoughts turn to presents. So, what makes it to the top of some semantic web and data experts’ holiday gift lists for their friends, family, colleagues – the world?

We asked, and their (mostly) semantic-web inspired holiday lists include some real and some imagined – not to mention imaginative – ideas. Read on:

John Breslin, Lecturer and researcher at NUI Galway, Creator of SIOC

If I could give out some Christmas tools or tips to colleagues or friends, the first would be to try out Drupal 7 on their own website, and get the metadata out there. I’d also ask that my friends show their friends some of the cool semantically-powered tools like Siri or Sig.ma to show the power of linking things together with semantics. Finally, in terms of useful non-semantic free programs, I’d give out Evernote, Dropbox, Inkscape, the Gimp, and TweetDeck (great for multiple keyword searches like “semantic web” OR semanticweb OR “sem web” OR semweb). Oh, and an online backup program of your choice, like Mozy or CrashPlan!

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