Zemanta, a semantic service that extracts entities within the text of a publisher’s content and suggests related media, links and tags to add to a work as it’s being written, has launched a content discovery network to complement its suggested recommendations for which authors create original content.

The focus here is on providing editorial control. Publishers can feature content recommendations from their site, other web sites (Zemanta has 300,000 publishers in its network), and advertisers, taking advantage of the option to let Zemanta’s semantic algorithms automatically make those selections for them or to take the manual content selection route. Another option is to blacklist sites that they don’t consider appropriate content sources.

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It’s been a big week for news, especially on the East Coast, where Hurricane Sandy punched hard. Add to that the U.S. presidential elections, the fighting in Syria, and the World Series win by the San Francisco Giants.

For those fortunate enough to have a charged iPad, or access to a power outlet (easier said than done in some parts of the country in the wake of the hurricane), a semantically-enabled application aims to bring the news videos that matter to those devices.

Link TV, which had a role in the ViewChange.org project that The Semantic Web Blog covered here, already offers up Link News, a site for global news and documentaries, that also relies on semantic technology to offer a portal to news from around the world. This week, it unveiled the LinkTV World News App for iPad that pulls top world news selected by editors from more than 125 video news outlets worldwide.

Announcing the app, Paul Mason, who became the company’s president and CEO last year (see our coverage here), said,  ”The LinkTV World News app does the heavy lifting so users don’t have to. A team of seasoned journalists using the best semantic ‘smart search’ technology sifts through thousands of newscasts and raw videos to bring people the stories that matter most.”

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Andraz Tori is the Owner and Chief Technology Officer at Zemanta, a tool that uses natural language processing (NLP) to extract entities within the text of a blog and enrich it with related media and articles from Zemanta’s broad user base.    This interview was conducted for Part 3 of the series “Dynamic Semantic Publishing for Beginners.”

Q. Although the term “Dynamic Semantic Publishing” appears to have come out of the BBC’s coverage of the 2010 World Cup, it looks as though Zemanta has been applying many of the same principles on behalf of smaller publishers since 2008.  Would you characterize it this way, or do you think that Zemanta is a more limited service with specific and targeted uses, while the platform built by BBC is its own semantic ecosystem?  How broadly should we define Dynamic Semantic Publishing?

A. What Zemanta does is empower the writer through semantic technologies. It’s like having an exoskeleton that gives you superpowers as an author. But Zemanta does not affect the post after it was written.   On the other hand dynamic semantic publishing is based on the premise of bringing together web pages piece-meal from a semantic database, usually in real time.

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The news of Facebook’s acquisition of mobile photo-sharing service Instagram for $1 billion this week may be fueling the dreams of tech start-ups of every stripe, including those in the semantic tech community. In fact, they may have even greater reason to be inspired: A recent  report has it that Instagram has been slowly rolling out an Open Graph integration for the app accomplished in collaboration with Facebook for seamlessly publishing photos to users’ Timelines in what may be the first of similar partner-deals down the road.

Other startups infused with semantic tech smarts may be on high lookout for funding opportunities as an important part of making those dreams come true. Thomson Reuters and The National Venture Capital Association this week released funding stats for the first quarter of 2012 that could put a bit of a damper on things: It found a 35 percent decrease by dollar commitments and a 9 percent decline by number of funds, compared to the first quarter of 2011. But, according to a statement by Mark Heesen, president of the NVCA, venture firms “appear to be more optimistic about the fundraising environment in 2012.”

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Ryan Kim recently spoke to Zemanta CTO Andraz Tori regarding the company’s role in the growing smart personal assistant field. Kim writes, “When I first heard of Zemanta, I thought of it as a great tool for bloggers, helping recommend links, content and images. And it does that quite well, helping some 80,000 active users. But after talking with Zemanta’s CTO and co-founder Andraz Tori, our conversation turned to the bigger picture of what New York-based Zemanta is doing. And it’s really in a similar vein as Apple’s Siri, IBM’s Watson and other services. We’re now entering the age of the smart personal assistant, as computers increasingly listen and understand what we’re saying and fulfill our requests and questions in real time.” Read more

Zemanta’s inked a deal with Federated Media that could make brand advertising via blogosphere contributions scale higher, faster. Federated Media lets independent bloggers participate as partner-publishers in programs to build brand engagement. For example, for Dockers, Federated Media had publishers with a strong male following write articles around the theme of men crafting lifetime legacies, which were used to increase page-views and clicks to, and reader interaction with, Dockers.

Zemanta’s technology has its roots in helping bloggers with suggestions of tags, links, photos, related articles, and more to add contextual relevance to their content. It analyzes posts using proprietary natural language processing and semantic algorithms, and statistically comparing its contextual framework to its pre-indexed database of content to supply its recommendations. Zemanta content sources include Wikipedia, IMDb, Amazon, Flickr, Crunchbase, Rotten Tomatoes and Freebase, among many others.

Zemanta CTO Andraz Tori says that the big advantage Zemanta brings to the relationship is that it has lots of engaged bloggers as well as the technologies to ‘understand’ what they are writing about. “FM usually worked just with couple of hundred bloggers and we’ll be able to scale that to many more,” he says.

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Editor’s Update Jan. 19: DBpedia, Wikipedia and company are all back online, while some lawmakers have taken their support for SOPA and PIPA offline. Republican Senators Roy Blunt and Marco Rubio have withdrawn their support for the Protect IP Act, and Representative Lee Terry (R-Neb.), an original co-sponsor of SOPA, also has asked to have his name removed from the bill.

It’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) day. At 8 a.m. EST  OpenLink Software began a 12-hour blackout of the following sites it controls in support of Wikipedia, Reddit and others spearheading the online protest against the legislation:

• http://dbpedia.org
• http://dbpedia-live.openlinksw.com
• http://lod.openlinksw.com
• http://uriburner.com

Founder and CEO of OpenLink Software Kingsley Idehen yesterday directed interested parties to a Linked Data-driven poll for the opportunity to vote on taking this step, and the ayes, so to speak, had it.

Turn to any of the above sites and you’ll see:

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Courtesy: Flickr/ Vince Viloria

Out with the old, in with the new. We’ve covered (here and here) the year past for the semantic web. So now let’s see what might be in store for the year ahead.

Also, don’t forget to listen to our podcast here for more insights into what 2012 may hold.

• Interest in sentiment analysis exploded with the growth of the social Web, although its reputation suffered due to the prevalence of low-grade Twitter-sentiment toys, simplistic, wildly inaccurate systems that misled many into criticism of the concept where it was the cheap implementations they’d tried that were faulty.  In 2012, sentiment analysis will come into its own: Automated (and crowd-sourced!) mining of attitudes, opinions, emotions, and intent from social and enterprise sources, at the “feature” level, linked to real-world profiles and transactional data. — Seth Grimes, founder, Alta Plana Corp

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Courtesy: Flickr/ myaimistrue

We recently rounded up some thought leaders’ perspectives on the big semantic trends of 2011 – most (if not all) of them positive. Here’s some further perspective about where hopes and expectations fell a little short of reality:

• The biggest lost possibility was not rethinking the whole RDF stack. Instead of actually reducing complexity, it seems the direction is hiding complexity. This makes its proposition unattractive for web developers. – Andraž Tori, Founder and Director, Zemanta

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To accompany our recent podcast looking back on 2011, we’ve accumulated some additional perspectives from thought leaders in the next-wave Web space on the year that’s quickly passing us by.

Some highlights follow. You’ll see respondents hit on some common themes throughout, such as Big Data, sentiment analytics, specific vertical industry adoption, and the standards space:

• SKOS has become an increasingly popular entry point for organizations that want to use semantic technology in practical applications without worrying about the more complicated aspects of semantic web technology. – Bob  DuCharme, solutions architect, TopQuadrant

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