Instagram. Tumblr. Pinterest. The web in 2012 is a tremendously visual place, and yet, “visual media still as dumb today as it was 20 years ago,” says Todd Carter, founder and CEO of Tagasauris.

It doesn’t have to be that way, and Tagasauris has put its money on changing the state of things.

Why is dumb visual media a problem, especially at the enterprise-level? Visual media, in its highly un-optimized state, hasn’t been thought of in the same way that companies think about how making other forms of data more meaningful and reasonable can impact their business processes. A computer’s ability to assess image color, pattern and texture isn’t highly useful in the marketplace, and as a result visual media has “just been outside the realm of normal publishing processes, normal workflow processes,” Carter says. Therefore, what so many organizations – big media companies, photo agencies, and so on –  would rightly acknowledge to be their treasure troves of images don’t yield anywhere near the economic value that they can.

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How efficient is the enterprise at using information? An independent report being released today from MindMetre Research, sponsored by semantic content intelligence vendor Smartlogic, offers up an Industry Information Index that benchmarked organizations in 20 industry sectors – and finds that information efficiency is fundamentally unsatisfactory.

The benchmarks considered as markers of information efficiency enterprise search effectiveness; information categorization effectiveness; and categorization and search progress and investment.  They also explored the fragmentation of information systems at responding companies. Fewer than half the 2,000 firms surveyed worldwide rated their sector as capable across the four categories, indicating issues around tasks such as systematizing documents to make them findable across the enterprise, or enabling internal users and clients to receive precisely filtered information feeds.

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Yandex, Russia’s leading search engine has announced that it is joining forces with Google, Bing, and Yahoo! to collaborate on schema.org. One article reports, “Now the pages tagged with Schema.org tags will be picked up not only by Yandex search engine, but also its other services, such as Yandex’s Business Directory, Yandex.Dictionaries, Yandex.Images and Yandex.Video. Yandex shows the data from these services also in its search results.” Read more

A new article looks at a developing trend of not just tagging television shows by episode but by the content of individual scenes. The article states, “Historically, TV Metadata has been used to supply Electronic Programme Guides (EPGs) and therefore has been adequate for description at a show level. But what about at the scene level? And why is scene level metadata — or Tagging TV — the new oil? It’s now all about applying metadata not just to a whole piece of content, but
individual chunks within it, such as a movie scene or song. Of course, this can be relevant both for production and search/discovery… but the real value lies in providing contextual data on the second screen — whether that be curated or automated, factual or commercial.” Read more

A recent article provides an introduction to Thetus Corporation’s MetaCarta tool and underscores the value of geotagging. The article begins, “Context is everything when it comes to modeling what people do and why they do it. Geospatial context is one of the cornerstones of cultural and human ecosystem modeling and analysis. We are working on allowing analysts to build general concept models that can be reused and shared with the ability to add geospatial and cultural context. Take the concept of ‘wealth’– the general models or concepts for wealth are fairly consistent across the world, however, the specific dynamics vary widely from place to place.” Read more

According to a recent article, iGlue makes virtually any webpage more informative through rich annotations: “There are plenty of projects out there vying to ‘annotate the Web’ in different ways, from Apture to Google SideWiki and Pushnote, but iGlue is different because it combines a simple concept with rich data and a wiki-like approach. The idea behind iGlue is to add rich background information to any web page, automatically, as an additional ‘layer’ on top of the page. Once you’ve installed this browser plugin, a click of the iGlue button will load up yellow highlighted marks over words in the text on the page you’re looking at.” Read more

A new Dublin-based start-up called B-Sm@rk promises a semantic tagging tool that allows people “to register instantly how they feel about and react to a product, event, web content or brand.” According to the article, “The company claims its first product MySmark is five times more effective than the now-familiar ‘Like’ button on sites such as Facebook because it makes the user’s interaction with the content more personal and accurate. MySmark is a coloured, personalised smart wheel that allows people to leave one-click smarks, or ‘smart marks’, on a website, in an app or on a social network page. People can calibrate their feedback, leaving up to 32 different tags based on their emotions and moods.” Read more

On Tuesday Google announced, “Today we’re beginning to support authorship markup—a way to connect authors with their content on the web. We’re experimenting with using this data to help people find content from great authors in our search results. We now support markup that enables websites to publicly link within their site from content to author pages. For example, if an author at The New York Times has written dozens of articles, using this markup, the webmaster can connect these articles with a New York Times author page. An author page describes and identifies the author, and can include things like the author’s bio, photo, articles and other links.” Read more

A recent article discusses many businesses resistance to semantic technology as a result of not fully understanding the risks involved. The article notes, “The use of semantic technologies for automating manual tasks, or for making previously out of reach knowledge more accessible, is (fortunately for us!) an area where companies are still making investments despite the crisis, because they understand the importance of having this strategic advantage. Still, when I suggest an automated solution to replace a manual activity (tagging, categorization, monitoring information flows) to potential customers, I am occasionally met with some resistance. Many times, the customer is not able to properly evaluate the pros and cons, and ends up opting for a very basic solution, and in doing so, loses the opportunity for tremendous cost savings and service improvements.” Read more

Saplo, a Swedish semantic web start-up has released a new text analysis API. The tool “should help developers build tools to tap into the company’s semantic technology platform. This should allow people to build their own personalization or recommendation apps based on contextual meaning rather than solely on tags or keywords. The API offers access to 5 different services: entity tagging, topic tags, related and similar articles, contextual recognition, and sentiment analysis.” Read more