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)

 

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 !

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.

Read more

Get ready for some new apps for Elsevier’s Sciverse framework. Last year Elsevier, which has one of the largest vaults of scientific data in the world, launched its Sciverse Applications module. This provided a way for researchers and scientists to develop and share customized solutions that improve search and discovery of its wealth of integrated content and meta-data in the SciVerse hub of ScienceDirect, SciVerse Scopus, Sciverse SciTopics, and targeted web content.

Now it’s announced the winners of its Apps For Science competition, social and semantic ones that plug into the framework among them (see above). Elsevier recognizes that when it comes to meeting researchers’ search and discovery needs, it can’t do it all alone. “We’re not going to come up with all the solutions ourselves, so a key goal is to collaborate with developers and researchers to provide tools,” says Rafael Sidi, Vice President Product Management, Applications Marketplace and Developer Network, Elsevier

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A recent article reports, “Many newspapers and other traditional media entities still think of themselves as delivering their content in a specific package… But few are thinking about their businesses in radically different ways — as content-generating engines with multiple delivery methods, or as platforms for data, around which other things can be built. USA Today appears to be moving in this direction, by opening up its data for others to use and even commercialize, following in the footsteps of The Guardian and its ground-breaking open platform.” Read more

The New York Times Company is looking for a Web Developer in New York, NY. The post states, “NYTimes.com is looking for an experienced and self-motivated Web Developer to drive implementiation of our SEO initiatives. This position will deal with all aspects affecting SEO including server configuration, site performance, and monitoring tools. Other responsibilities include ongoing site maintenance and technical documentation. Strong communication skills are a must as this position interacts heavily with many departments within NYTimes.com.” Read more

[UPDATE - November 9, 2011: the IPTC rNews version 1.0 documentation is now available.]

Today (Oct. 7, 2011), at a gathering of the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), rNews took the step from being a proposal to being a formal standard. rNews was created by the IPTC and made its public debut earlier this year as a proposal for using RDFa to annotate news-specific metadata in HTML documents.

Congratulations to the IPTC and the leaders of the rNews standardization effort: Andreas Gebhard (Getty Images), Evan Sandhaus (New York Times), and Stuart Myles (Associated Press).

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We recently reported on the New York Times new testing and collaboration platform, beta620. A recent article reports that, “An interesting Semantic Web experiment went live this week [on beta620] called Longitude. As the name suggests, it presents a geographical interface for accessing content from The Times. It uses The Time’s large store of metadata, along with Linked Open Data from the Web.” Read more

The New York Times has launched a new platform called beta620 for testing and collaborating on experimental NYT projects. “For years,” the article notes, “the NYT’s systems and technology team has had a blog, Open, where they’ve shared data and coding projects with the public. But Open primarily targeted other developers, particularly those using the NYT’s data APIs to build their own tools. beta620 is aimed at nytimes.com’s broader readership. It’s a chance to test how new prototypes work, generate community input, figure out how they can best add value to the company, and build and iterate on the fly.” Read more

We recently have given coverage to the new rNews standard from the IPTC, but two things today caught our eye:

First, from Beet.tv, a brief video from Mike Dunn, VP and CTO of Hearst Interactive. The video serves as an introduction to the value of rNews in the media industry, and does that well.  That said, I think it could also be used as an elevator pitch for publishing decision-makers who are considering implementing rNews, RDFa, or more generally, Semantic Technologies.  Mike indicates that Hearst is currently evaluating rNews.

The video can be seen here:

NOTE: Mike Dunn will be speaking at SemTech 2011, where there will also be a presentation on the rNews standard. Read more

As a kid, I always wanted to be a reporter. Woodward and Bernstein were my heroes. I wanted to be the person you saw reporting live from some trouble spot in the world.

So when Eric Franzon asked me to report live from the Semantic Web MeetUp on RNEWS that was held in the New York Times building in Manhattan last week, I leaped at the chance. The New York Times is journalism at its best and their building resonates with the history of the 20th century. Outside the room where the SemWeb techies gathered, was a wall display of NYT front pages from the First World War to the present.

This makes you aware how incredibly important reporting the news is to our lives. The events in the Middle East have had me glued to my Twitter List, linking from there to reports from Al Jazeera and Nick Kristof’s wonderfully impassioned reporting for the New York Times. Read more