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.

Read more

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 latest version of the StreamGlider iPad news reader app for providing consumers with topic-oriented streams of information debuted this week. It brought with it the capability to limit hashtag or keyword searches in a Twitter, YouTube, or Flickr frame to a local area and turn on geo-awareness at the user’s request. But the bigger and more semantic event will be StreamGlider’s upcoming move to the enterprise, with the consumer app serving as a showcase to those potential customers.

StreamGlider CEO Bill McDaniel – also CEO of SemantiStar, which developed the application that The Semantic Web Blog first covered here and here – says to expect in the enterprise edition a very interesting semantic search/semantic relations engine in the background for correlating up to three data sets of semi-structured, unstructured and structured data. The company already is working with one client on a specific application of the generic technology for its custom needs, and talking to a second customer about a pilot around the idea.

Read more

Seevl, the music discovery service built on Semantic Technology that I wrote about a few months ago, has released a significant update to their plugin for YouTube. The plugin is still only available for the Google Chrome browser, but other browser plugins are in the works. You can grab the Chrome plugin here.

Once the plugin is installed, the user has new options available when visiting YouTube. First, there’s a new search option next to the standard YouTube search bar.

Read more

Yesterday, I wrote about how I’ve been using Seevl as a music discovery service. Today, I catch up with Dr. Alexandre Passant, CEO and Founder of Seevl.net, for a deeper look at the music discovery service.

Q: How would you describe Seevl?

A: We initially defined ourselves solely as a music discovery website, and we’re now developing several products around the data we gathered for building it. Our main focus is to bring context to music, and we want to help people to know more about the cultural and musical universe of the bands they like, to discover new ones and most importantly, to understand the connections between all.

Q: Where does the name “Seevl” come from?

Read more

A video on YouTube is educating viewers about “Making Video Search Semantic with Semex and Media Globe.” According to the video description, “Semantic search for multimedia is a problem every video site would like to solve. Imagine being able to search for a person and getting results for every video they appear in, without needing a text description included underneath. Or trying to locate every video posted about a specific location. Or getting the context of several videos all about baseball or your favorite movie character.” Read more

The Internet hasn’t quashed TV yet. The Nielsen Company just reported that Americans watched more television than ever last year, logging about 34 hours per week for broadcast networks and basic cable channels. While a lot of that time appears to be spent watching dramas like Hawaii Five-O, sports, and musically-infused Fox hits like American Idol and Glee, viewers are also tuning into news and other information programs that mix multiple stories and often provide opinions about those topics (whether from hosts or guests).

Call it the cloud of linear media – that’s what Critical Mention CEO Sean Morgan dubs it, and it’s a cloud he wants to own, organize and semanticize. The idea is to enable corporate general counsels and vice presidents of everything from corporate communications to PR to crisis communications to know in real-time not only that something’s being said about their client or corporate brand on broadcast TV –and radio, too – but what viewpoint is being taken, as well. Is the polarity expressive of positive or negative sentiment or opinion?

Read more

 

Here are two words that don’t necessarily spring first to mind when you think of implementing cutting-edge semantic web technology: Video and non-profit.

 Yet that’s exactly the direction taken by ViewChange.org , a project of Link Media’s LinkTV nationwide news, events and culture television channel and website. With funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, ViewChange.org uses video to tell stories about progress in global development, with an eye to influencing action on the part of everyone from average citizens to the media to policymakers to NGO staffers. Non-profit organizations, film distributors and individual filmmakers contribute to its own videos their documentaries, news reports, and other films to the site, and as users click through video links in featured topics, from water and sanitation to governance and transparency to environment, the site uses semantic web technologies to dynamically generate links from the video being viewed to related video media, news stories, topics and actions – links that change based on where you are in the video.   

Read more

Come tomorrow, you may be looking for a chance to do some relaxing reading after the Thanksgiving football and food fest and the Black Friday shopping chaos.

To that end, The Semantic Web Blog thought it would offer some guidance on a few analyst reports and surveys that you might enjoy spending some time with – and find useful for your business efforts, especially as they relate to how you can help drive value by better engaging with the exploding world of social media  – for your weekend reading:

 

•  Gleansight: Social Media Monitoring: A new analyst firm, Gleanster LLC, has produced a new report on what companies are learning about the emerging area of mining social media content as they attempt to better understand the voice of the customer to improve marketing and consumer satisfaction and reduce research and support costs, among other things. That includes, of course, using text mining apps to identify topics and using semantic technologies to classify comments by positive or negative sentiment. The report focuses on the challenges — the technological ones, of course, such as finding the valuable nuggets in the volume of data.

Read more

Changing the future of e-business Malta Business Weekly We are moving away from Web 2.0 and into the era of Web 3.0. Facebook, YouTube, social networks and blogs, that form part of Web 2.0, are only a pixel of …

Advocacy Site ViewChange.org Taps Semantic Web Technology MediaPost Publications Aiding this goal, semantic Web technology, which sees the entire Web as one big database, does more than scan for keywords in content across the Web. … LinkTV Building a YouTube for Social Change GigaOm (blog) Link TV to Launch ViewChange.org — a Digital-Media Hub to Spark Progress on … SYS-CON Media (press release) all 5 news articles »