It seems strange that I wrote about OpenCalais yesterday and am now doing it again 24 hours later.

There is good reason to be doing it again, a revamped OpenCalais has been released with updated features that add to the current healthy bevy and extend it them in ways to make them easier for developers to work with and supplement user experiences.

This trove of updates listed on their blog includes:

• Version 4.3 of the OpenCalais service features enhanced Social Tags for categorization; improved disambiguation; new entities, facts and events in English; and an entirely new feature called News Names.
• By popular demand, the improved Tagaroo plugin for WordPress gives users more control over the tagging process.
• Our URL submission tool, SemanticProxy, has been normalized to ensure that its results are identical with those you would get by programmatically submitting content to OpenCalais via the API. Additionally, we are now supporting JSONP. You can now specify a callback function when requesting results in JSON.
• Our Gnosis plugin for Firefox now includes categorization of processed Web pages in the sidebar and can sort entities by alphabetical order or according to frequency or relevance.
• And finally, we have published the OpenCalais Schema in OWL, enabling OWL enthusiasts to apply ontology based tools on OpenCalais metadata.

I’m eager to install the updated Tagaroo plugin for automatic generation of tags. This will be a welcome addition to making our posts even better. Once I have a chance to run Tagaroo through its paces, I’ll be sure to share.

Congratulations to the OpenCalais team for getting these updates out the door! The semantic web landscape is really starting to shape up into something that can help publishers and consumers discover better content.

OpenCalais Ups the Semantic Ante with Updates is a post from: TechStartups.com

The good folks from Open Calais were tweeting this morning about a mashup of search and their semantic engine called Drigger.

Drigger is a different type of search engine. For now it is running on top a limited data set as the founder, Martin Borho, continues to test his ideas.

If you would like to see the future of search you should take a look at Drigger and take in the interface, data and results like you’re at a wine tasting event. Borho has created, even with this limited data set, a full bodied type of search experience with linked data, contextual options and typographic references to importance of content.

This is the closest that I have seen anyone come to utilizing the power of Open Calais or any other semantic engine for search. All of the Drigger data elements are available in the Calais API but Borho represents them visually in a meaningful manner to a search experience.

What this means is that Calais is doing its job and so is the developer. Calais handles the linked data and the returning of relevant information while Drigger is the display layer. Successful representation of content relationships is often very difficult as developers have different notions of how to graphically display it. Borho has chosen to do so textually.

Drigger is a simple and graceful iteration of current popular search interfaces. The current spate, however, seem to be seeking more complex ways of displaying data instead of finding ways of returning more relevant results with better ancillary options for discovery.

And not to be left out of this information party, Borho has added auto-discovery RSS for keywords and categories. A man after my own heart. Let the structure data reign supreme!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Meaning Tool: Training Semantic Search With Feeds (readwriteweb.com)
• 7 New APIs: Music Recommendations, Rental Listings, Museum Data, Tweet Hooks and Twitter Topics (programmableweb.com)

Drigger – One Element of the Future of Search is a post from: TechStartups.com

With the imminent release of WordPress version 2.9 on the horizon and my subsequent lack of excitement, it only seems fitting to put together a wish list for the next version. It is even more fitting since Raanan (@raanan) asked, “What’s on your wishlist for 3.0 ?”

I partially answered that question in the comments with the following:

1. Semantic integration with Zemanta or OpenCalais
   1. This would be like having a librarian with a fancy masters degree in categorizing everything on the planet riding shotgun with you while you write.
2. WordPress recommended vocabulary for categories
   1. This could mirror NYT Open Linked Data RDF or other semantic tools
3. Image upload and modal window to open in advanced mode for properties control
   1. This could be a combo of both tabs but something more powerful from the first time the window opens so that users don’t need to perform multiple actions to add padding or custom links to images
4. Feed only choice for publishing posts
   1. This doesn’t have to be authenticated and would work by same rules with tags, categories, etc. to syndicate for apps or widgets
   2. Imagine being able to use WP as a CMS to manage the data that is delivered to mobile apps on the iPhone, Android, Blackberry or Palm as one standard

In addition to these four I have some more wishes for this list

1. The return of horizontal navigation to the administration panel or the option to choose vertical left side or horizontal suckerfish style
2. Integrated gallery function for display in themes
   1. Yes, there are plenty of plugins to do this but some of that code like the integration of the fabulous WPTouch mobile theme into central codebase would be huge
3. WordPress.org installs that allow for gravatar uploads through profiles
   1. Hook this into the .com API and welcome these users into the fold
   2. This could turn out to be a great way to make them familiar with the .com platform
   3. But mainly so users can swap them on the fly with their own installs
4. Content libraries from media companies
   1. Stock photos, video, quotes
      1. A new API component to allow multiple third parties to supply this content

I’m sure that over the next few weeks I will think about this some more and come up with a couple other ideas. But for now, what’s on your wishlist for 3.0 ?

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WordPress 3.0 Wish List is a post from: TechStartups.com

I’ve been a bit harsh on WordPress the last few weeks and need to give them some credit. Credit for being able to grown a large business from open source software and in the process share those gains with independent publishers worldwide.

WordPress is a startup success story.

It can’t be easy to build such a business with the multitude of competing interests that one is confronted with on a daily basis. Interests like monetization, product roadmap, network capacity for scale, software for scale, public opinion, etc.

So last Friday I wrote about not being excited by the new WordPress beta. I’m not. That isn’t because the software isn’t top notch and free. It is because it doesn’t wow me. When it comes to functionality it presents not a single new feature that I myself find better than the previous version. And that’s ok. My wishes are a competing interest with other users and most likely in the minority, for now.

This blog, right here, the one that you are reading is running on WordPress. I am intimately acquainted with it as over the past 6 weeks i have written 134 blog posts using it. Through extensibility I’ve found it to be even more of a solid companion for allowing me to publish with more ease. I’ve blogged about the Zemanta and OpenCalais plugins for the admin panel and they have helped to greatly speed the process up of adding metadata.

With all of that said, WordPress did impress me yesterday with a scantily documented feature, that in my mind makes it more useful. And to make it more exciting it is a feature that I lauded Engadget and its development team for yesterday – URL graffiti.

Apparently, for over a year, hibernating in the WordPress codebase has been the ability to add multiple tags to a URL to create a query that will retrieve the corresponding content. A quick example being this link that looks up posts tagged with engadget, stylecaster and twitter. And they have the RSS component built in as well.

For all of the same reasons that I praised Engadget I will praise WordPress too. There seem to be many lesser documented features that make the platform a stronger engine for publishers. Maybe these are extensibility hooks that added in hopes that they will be enhanced later in the development cycle and they’ve fallen by the wayside.

Regardless, WordPress is a great product for those not wishing to build their own blogging platforms. Which, of course, I would say is north of 99.8% of bloggers. It offers the opportunity to self-publish in a way that very tools throughout history have for the cost.

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Cutting WordPress Some Slack is a post from: TechStartups.com

Linking words together online is an hobby. Creating context from those words is an art. Making them work in harmony is a gift. The team at Thomson Reuters have done this for some time with their Calais project and the first consumer product from it OpenCalais.

OpenCalais is a monster database filled with linked data that can be accessed by anyone via a special API. Currently it works on an individual application level and as plugins with other popular CMS and blogging platforms. In tandem they create a more powerful experience for the publishers of new content by allowing the integration of linked data for linking, tagging and finding optional third-party resources for inspiration.

Word on the street and from a trusted source is that the Calais team has something new on the horizon – their own CMS. A release of a CMS that has semantic technologies built right into is a powerful addition to the marketplace. Many blogging platforms and CMS products available today have stagnated under the weight of their own popularity.

It is hard to innovate when you are leading the pack or trying to figure out how to make money from your product that is free. Time and resources become devoted to maintaining the status quo, patching holes and community relations and support. Not to mention that many of these tools have crept out from the minds of developers and not publishers.

The same can’t be said for Thomson Reuters Calais Initiative. With a business model built in from the inception of the project they have the ability to create value from the wealth of content that is entering their system. It is treated to some natural language processing, machine learning and prepared to link with other content. As the initiative currently exists it is the side car to better publishing as there is no status quo or hole patching. They realized this.

Throwing a CMS on top of this type of foundation is a logical move for OpenCalais to extend development and create publisher relations. There has been so little innovation in core CMS offerings that most rely on third-party developers to create additional functionality or implement API’s like OpenCalais, Zemanta and other discovery products.

An OpenCalais CMS, blogging platform or whatever comes from this group is going to be a welcome addition to the choices that publishers have available today. The closest opportunity today to creating a true semantic experience in a publishing platform that is readily available would be to install the Zemanta plugin in WordPress. It transforms the writing experience. An offering from Calais could transform the writing and CMS experience.

Update: Krista Thomas (@kristathomas) from OpenCalais got in touch to say that there is a fully integrated CMS based on Drupal called OpenPublish available now.

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CMS Innovations from Thomson Reuters? is a post from: TechStartups.com