Lingospot: In Text Content Discovery Means Auto Linking
May 9, 2008
A semi-happy quack to the person who called Lingospot to my attention. The company uses linguistic analysis to identify and create dynamic links on publishers’ or bloggers’ pages. The idea is that you hover over a Lingospot link, a “Discovery Bubble” pop ups up and shows content from related Web sites. The idea is that a user will discover new, contextually relevant content. The company offer “online content discovery services”. The idea is that a publisher doesn’t have the money to pay a human to build these “See Also” references.
Lingospot inked a deal with Yedda.com. You can read the full news story here. Hurry, PR announcements can be ephemeral. A more compelling illustration of Lingospot’s system in action appears on the Forbes.com Web site. The idea is that the technology will increase a Forbes visitor’s “engagement”. Translation: time on the site and clicks which presumably will boost ad revenue. The Lingospot asserts that a typical licensee would enjoy a two to five percent increase in page views, a significant boost for a high-traffic site.
Forbes.com exposes the content to the Lingospot system, and then the Lingospot linguistic technology generates the self-referential links. My tests on Forbes.com may have been erroneous, but I was bounced around the sprawling Forbes.com Web site, not set to relevant content on Business Week’s or Fortune’s Web site, which would have been more useful to me.
My typical behavior on any site that features pop ups is to dismiss and ignore annoying fly over ads. I then avoid any links in the article text that produce these pop up links.
I may be the odd duck out (see logo to understand the metaphor), but I want to scan the Forbes.com article, not ads, not related content, and not pop ups that get in the way of reading the story. The Forbes’ story is what caused me to click in the first place. You may have a different view of these helpful “Discovery Bubbles”, and I encourage you to form your own opinion.
There’s a modest amount of information on the Lingospot.com Web site. If I were to sign up for the service, the Lingospot.com system puts a JavaScript snippet on the Web log. At this time, the company supports Blogger, Moveable Type, TypPad, and WordPress. You can, however, put the Lingospot function on any page. I decided to opt out of the service. My experience is that link services have to process the content on the Web site, and the delay can be a couple of days. However, I added Lingospot.com to my list of auto linkers which includes such companies as AdValiant.com, EchoTopic.com, and Kontera.com. You can find even more of these services on the Online Marketing Innovations’ Web log Folden here.
One of my sources told me that the company’s NLP technology is based on five years of research and development. The beta service became available in 2005. The company was founded in 2006.
Lingospot’s CEO is Nikos Iatropoulos. You can hear an interview with him at Social Buzz. Bob Sherry, formerly at ValueClick,is the senior VP of sales and marketing for the company. The firm operates from its offices in Los Angeles. If you want to know more about Lingospot, you could ring 310 475 1600 and leave a message.
The use of linguistic technology to make related information available is a good one. Describing these pop ups as a content discovery tools seems to be massaging a well-worn advertising chestnut. As Google’s dominance of online search continues without a significant challenge from Ask.com, Microsoft.com, or Yahoo.com, these “new marketing tools” becomes important to Web masters who can’t generate enough revenue from traffic to keep the lights on.
What’s interesting to me is that the once-exotic linguistic and semantic technologies are now sufficiently tame for use by marketing companies. The semantic revolution is indeed here when an account rep can mouth a phrase like “in text content discovery”, confident that the demo relies on high-tech voodoo that sort of works. For cash-strapped and traffic-challenged publishers, auto linking may be a modest silver bullet.
Stephen Arnold, May 9, 2008
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One Response to “Lingospot: In Text Content Discovery Means Auto Linking”
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Stephen,
Thanks so much for your thorough review of our services and the “in-text content discovery” arena. Your insights are greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Bob Sherry