candometa.com

Whilst I am at home, ill, I have a little more time to read through the postings and articles which bumble through my Netvibes page on a daily basis, and one article in particular caught my eye. Reuters Wants The World To Te Tagged, from ReadWriteWeb

Relevancy is one of the key mantras of content and product delivery online. If what you are providing is not seen relevant to the users needs, desires and interests then you have to go along way to make them interact or engage with it, this is, after all, how Google has made all of it’s money.

The move towards a more semantic web and the use and re-use of metadata is beginning to drive relevancy to another level, and a passage in the article provided some clues as to the power this could have for the user:

Yet another application would be to incorporate on the fly text analysis into the browsers. In a way, this is not much different from having Microformat annotations on the page, except that the annotations are delivered on the fly. For example, a browser could call Calais on document load and obtain a list of people, places, companies, etc. which are embedded in the document. With this information the browser would be able to create a more interesting, more contextual, and relevant experience.

The fact that it is Reuters who are moving this forward, and also building this ‘open’, shows that they see the power of this relevancy at all levels, and starting with People, Companies, Places and Events make sense … it is one of these four which become relevant to users, someone you know, somewhere you go, an event you go to or a company you purchase from, for example.

We work with Reuters in the office, so will see whether we can start to look at implementing something similar to the suggested usage above. It seems that Reuters will become a kind of ‘web service’ for information and data, and therefore begin to create relationships across all areas of internet content, and also it seems that they are being ‘open’ with this, so the returned result set can be run against other information and data sources.

Powerful and relevant … there is a step towards becoming indispensable.