Q: What do Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Yandex, the New York Times, and The Walt Disney Company have in common?

A: schema.org

On June 2, 2011, schema.org was launched with little fanfare, but it quickly received a lot of attention. Now, almost exactly one year later, we have assembled a panel of experts from the organizations listed above to discuss what has happened since and what we have to look forward to as the vocabulary continues to grow and evolve, including up-to-the-minute news and announcements. The panel will take place at the upcoming Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco.

Moderated by Ivan Herman, the Semantic Web Activity Lead for the World Wide Web Consortium, the panel includes representatives from each of the core search engines involved in schema.org, and two of the largest early implementers: The New York Times and Disney. Among the topics we will discuss will be the value proposition of using schema.org markup, publishing techniques and syntaxes, vocabularies that have been mapped to schema.org, current tools and applications, existing implementations, and a look forward at what is planned and what is needed to encourage adoption and consumption.

Panelists:

	Moderator: Ivan Herman Semantic Web Activity Lead, World Wide Web Consortium		Dan Brickley Contractor, schema.org at Google
	John Giannandrea Director Engineering, Google		Peter Mika Senior Researcher, Yahoo!
	Alexander Shubin Product Manager, Head of Strategic Direction, Yandex		Mike Van Snellenberg Principal Program Manager, Microsoft/Bing
	Evan Sandhaus Semantic Technologist, New York Times Company		Jeffrey W. Preston SEO Manager, Disney Interactive Media Group

These panelists, along with the rest of the more than 120 speakers from SemTechBiz, will be on-hand to answer audience questions and discuss the latest work in Semantic Technologies. You can join the discussion by registering for SemTechBiz – San Francisco today (and save $200 off the onsite price)

 

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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 !

Lance Ulanoff of Mashable reports, “Bing has been reinvented, offering enhanced search results that tap into the power of social media. Microsoft has done this by pulling people out of search results and putting them in their place: A right-hand social column that will eventually include Facebook, Twitter, Google+ Quora and LinkedIn integration, as well as people who may know something about your most recent Bing query. It even offers a way to ask questions on your favorite social network, directly through Bing.”

Ulanoff continues, “It’s something of an about-face for the Number 2 search engine, which up until earlier this year has been slowly but surely integrating Facebook information (like “Likes”) directly into Bing Search results. Read more

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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Update: Yandex today (April 26th) reported that net income in the first three months of 2012 rose 53 percent from the same period last year to 1.26 billion rubles ($43 million) as text-based advertising revenue rose, according to Bloomberg. Sales gained 51 percent to 5.9 billion rubles.

In November Russian search engine Yandex joined Google, Microsoft Bing, and Yahoo! to collaborate on schema.org. The Semantic Web Blog recently caught up by email with Alexander Shubin, Yandex product manager and head of strategic direction, to discuss this and other developments.

The Semantic Web Blog: Can you update us about how Yandex is doing? We know it’s still leading search traffic in Russia, but do you see more competition there, and how have international expansion plans been proceeding?

Shubin: Yandex is the leader in Russia with 59 to 60 percent market share. Russia is one of the few countries where a local search engine keeps a leading position, in spite of international players’ expansion.

Last year Yandex was launched in Turkey, where we suggest 12 services (including web search) so far. According to our statistics, yandex.com.tr processes more than 1 million queries daily. Turkey is the first non-Russian speaking market for us and we have done a lot of work to deliver services that would be interesting for the local community.  The main target for Yandex in Turkey, where one search engine still keeps 90 percent of search market, is to become the Number 2 player and to deliver more local search results and services than our competitor does.

Turkey is more or less an experiment for us: If we meet our target there, we can potentially do the same on any other non-Russian speaking market. But it is too early to make any conclusions or announcements so far as we have worked in Turkey only half of year. Stay tuned!

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What’s on the markup menu for the restaurant industry?

Among the schema.org tags for marking up web pages is one for restaurants, which includes item properties for priceRange, servesCuisine, place, and menu, among others. Restaurants that use the markup language to structure their data are promised search engine optimization (SEO) benefits when hungry consumers want to see what’s on the menu at moderately-priced nearby Italian eateries, for example. They might also or alternately use the GoodRelations ontology for e-commerce to better accommodate search engines, as well as mobile and desktop apps, with service details of hours, payment options, and daily menus that are accessible in up to 50 languages.

OpenMenu has a value proposition around structured data for restaurant owners, too: Providing increased exposure to Internet, mobile and web apps, via what it aims to be a global and open standard for storing, sharing and using their menus over the Internet. The technical details are described at its OpenMenu.org site. Initially launched in 2010, it recently updated the format to Version 1.6 and currently counts about 75,000 menus as part of its landscape – 5,000 of them actively maintained and growing at a couple of thousand a week, according to CEO and founder Chris Hanscom.

Third-party developers can harness the data too, to build applications that interact with menus, like OpenMenu Search, a way for a search engine to drill down through a restaurant’s information to the menu and menu items.

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Late last week Bloomberg Businessweek reported that Facebook is working on an improved search engine with 20 developers under the direction of former Google engineer Lars Rasmussen, who joined the social network giant in 2010. According to the article’s unnamed sources, the goal “is to help users better sift through the volume of content that members create on the site, such as status updates, and the articles, videos, and other information across the Web that people ‘like’ using Facebook’s omnipresent thumbs-up button.”

As the news starts to make its way around the Web, the focus is on how this can intensify the competition between Facebook and Google, even if Facebook doesn’t directly go after the big web search enchilada. (Most seem to agree that it isn’t, at least not yet.) Better searching inside its own four walls, with its ability to use its host of knowledge about friends’ social graph data – their Likes and more – to more accurately personalize results, might encourage users to stay where they are rather than head out to search engine land, at least for some things. And at the same time let Facebook hone its advertising to profit from improved search results, too.

It would be an interesting turn of events, to have the leading search engine face the dilemma that online publishers long have been trying to deal with – keeping visitors engaged and exploring on their own sites rather than departing for Google in search of related information. As The Semantic Web Blog reported this week in a story about premium publishers deploying more semantic technology to try to solve that issue, most premium publishers lose 30 to 50 percent of their traffic to search engines.

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The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism State of the News Media 2012 report was just published, and among the findings is that efforts by most top news sites to monetize the web in their own right are still limited. Few news companies, it reports, “have made much progress in some key new digital areas. Among the top news websites, there is little use of the digital advertising that is expected to grow most rapidly, so-called “smart,” or targeted, advertising.”

 

 

Failing to make a lot more hay from digital ads is problematic for traditional news companies given the decline in print circulation and in its ad revenue, too. The report says that in 2011, losses in print advertising dollars outpaced gains in digital revenue by a factor of roughly 10 to 1, which it calls an even worse ratio than in 2010.

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Need another reason for bringing semantic smarts to your web site? Maybe you can find it in a post at Search Engine Land, which includes a piece of a podcast from an SXSW session, and a transcription of it, featuring Google’s head of webspam team Matt Cutts (over this way).

At the session, Cutts noted that Google has been working in the last few months to level the playing field so the advantage doesn’t go to those more focused on overusing search engine optimization vs. producing great content and sites. Over the next months or few weeks it plans to announce something about this, that will involve what it’s been doing to “make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.”

Take that plus the past year’s developments around the schema.org Google-Microsoft-Yahoo-Yandex collaboration (see stories like these here and here and here), and the latest playing up by Google of its continuing semantic search technology efforts (see here), and it seems there’s more and more reason more closely on semantic markup as part of a solid and truly helpful SEO strategy.

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ComScore this week issued a report that wasn’t particularly flattering to Google Plus. It noted that users spent just 3.3 minutes on the social network in January compared to 7.5 hours for Facebook. Much discussion revolved around the fact that Google last month touted that the service had grown to 90 million users from 40 million in October.

Google Plus, as The Semantic Web Blog reported here, informs the personalized results that are delivered through Search Plus Your World, such as the Google+ photos and posts users have shared or that have been shared with them through the social network.

One question raised by the ComScore report is what impact the slow takeup might have, if any, on Search Plus Your World. Shortly after Google Plus’ debut, The Semantic Web Blog published a post by Christine Connors, principal at TriviumRLG LLC, discussing why, as she has put it, the service is “one of the subtlest and most user-friendly ontology development systems we’ve ever seen.” Of the ComScore data , she says, “that’s an ‘average’ number. Which means that millions of folks who’ve signed up haven’t used it, and far fewer millions spend hours on it every month. What that says to me is that for some people Search Plus Your World would be almost useless, and for those who use G+ regularly SPYW has a decent and always improving personalized algorithm and index behind it.  Take out the privacy concerns and the people using G+ will have an increasingly positive sense of satisfaction with Google for Search and more.  Problem is, taking out the privacy concerns is very troublesome.”

Speaking of privacy: Today, of course, is the date that Google’s privacy policy changes.

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Personalized news app News360 yesterday updated its Windows Phone application, which makes up one of what’s still a relatively few 50,000 apps for the platform in the Windows Phone Marketplace. Right now, the device platform has just under 2 percent of the smartphone OS market, but that could change: Analyst firm IDC, for example, reported in June that, “assuming that Nokia’s transition to Windows Phone goes smoothly, the OS is expected to defend a number 2 rank and more than 20 percent share in 2015.” Nokia, whose first Windows Phone 7 devices have been available in the U.S. since earlier this year, is expected to announce two Windows phones on Monday, according to Reuters: a cheaper Lumia 610 and a global version of its high-end Lumia 900 phone.

News360, which joined the Microsoft BizSpark One program in November, is tapping into the action with the update that now sports a user interface designed around the Metro UI concepts pioneered by Microsoft, according to CEO Roman Karachinsky. It’s marked by “simplicity, cleanliness and efficient flow, which is radically different from the design of our iOS and Android apps,” he says. “The app also uses several features unique to Windows Phone – like live tiles, which allow you to pin the categories that you want to follow more closely straight to your home screen.”

News360 worked closely with Microsoft on this release, he notes, as part of Microsoft’s Mobile Acceleration Week development, a program to get partner companies together with the designers and developers of Windows Phone “to yield amazing apps for the platform.” Other features News360 touts for the latest version also include connecting their social media accounts to tailor news to their interests and Fast App Switching support for a better user experience.

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