MediaBriefing and Semantics
October 18, 2010
At a recent conference, a person mentioned the site, www.mediabriefing.com. I took a look at it and found its coverage on point. I am not too interested in the media sector, preferring to track the foibles and follies of search and content processing system vendors.
What did catch my attention was “New Site — and Semantic Technologies — May Help The Publishing Industry Sail To The New Media World.” The story reported:
Here’s where the semantic part comes in at TheMediaBriefing.com: It uses core aspects of idio’s semantic web technology to find, classify, tag, and index these sources to deliver to readers in the media industry what TheMediaBriefing.com says are very accurate matches to their information needs. Brown’s background in blogging, and searching and curating various sources of news pertaining to the media, led him to the conclusion that getting hold of and coalescing the data you really needed often involved following a big trail that combined everything from news sites to social media to non-traditional outlets that his peers didn’t always themselves think to go to.
I don’t have much detail about the semantic system in use, but I think the idea is a good one. If the write up is on the money, the notion of a news operation relying on semantic technology is an interesting use case.
Several observations:
- Big dog publishers like LexisNexis have been ankle deep in semantic technology and other content technologies for many years. The problem is that the financial situation at some big dogs is challenging. Semantic technology may not be the tow truck needed to drag the companies back from the brink.
- Semantic technology, as I have suggested, works best as plumbing. Will publishers and readers realize that semantic technology is behind the new site. My hunch is that some may; others will not.
- Publishing as an industry is experimenting with new partners and different business models. The good news is that some of the partners are tech savvy. The bad news is that some of the business models don’t generate the margins that the old business models did. Semantic technology may not be able to change the bad news into good news quickly enough.
Check out the links in this article. Interesting stuff.
Stephen E Arnold, October 18, 2010
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2 Responses to “MediaBriefing and Semantics”
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Stephen,
Thanks for the shout out here. Just wanted to point out that you have our URL wrong. It should be http://www.themediabriefing.com.
You are quite right when you say that it may not be evident to users that we are using semantic tools to organise and thread content. What appears to be happening though, is that the impact is dramatic on the behaviour of users in the site. Page views/session are about double what I expect , as is time spent. But its not just about technology, we spend time every day working on the supporting taxonomy and commissioning original expert accounts. Its a blend of technology and good old fashioned industry knowledge and editing. We have more sites for other verticals coming soon, so look out for those.
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