Thomson Reuters Celebrates Ten Innovative Sites And Services Using OpenCalais

Publishers and Web 2.0 Entrepreneurs Tap Semantic Web Service to Mine Social Media, Deliver Intelligent Content Services

San Francisco, Calif. - Web 2.0 Summit - Thomson Reuters today issued an update on its OpenCalais Initiative, and cited ten innovative sites and services that use OpenCalais to reduce costs, deliver compelling content experiences and mine the social web for insight.

“Less than two years into the project, 18,000 developers have joined the OpenCalais community and we are now processing four million documents per day,” said Tom Tague, OpenCalais Initiative lead, Thomson Reuters. “We are inspired and humbled by the creativity that today’s Web 2.0 entrepreneurs and online publishers have brought to bear in putting OpenCalais to work, and we are thrilled to recognize ten new sites and services that are changing the way we engage with news and the social Web.”

The newest publishers to join CBS Interactive / CNET, Huffington Post, DailyMe and others in using OpenCalais include:

The New Republic - http://www.tnr.com - The new site for The New Republic uses OpenPublish, an OpenCalais-enabled Drupal-powered Content Management System (CMS) to increase editorial productivity, improve search engine optimization, and drive reader engagement, including faceted search, recommended reading sidebars and - coming soon - automatically generated topic hubs. Using OpenPublish also provides New Republic editors with an easy way to innovate, using metadata to intelligently “mashup” content to create new products and display existing content in new and exciting ways.

Al Jazeera English’s new blogging network - http://blogs.aljazeera.net/ - features Al Jazeera correspondents from around the world. AJE head of online media, Mohamed Nanabhay, told Journalism.co.uk that “Just browsing through our correspondent blogs will give you a real sense of the breadth of our coverage, while diving into the posts provides real depth and insight into our world.” All posts in the new blog network are semantically tagged using OpenCalais for optimal search and navigation. It also uses a Creative Commons license and allows users to sign-in to comment using Facebook Connect, Twitter or OpenID.

Slate Magazine’s News Dots Network - http://slatest.slate.com/features/news_dots/default.htm - News Dots visualizes the most recent topics in the news as a concise network of related topics. Subjects are connected to one another if they appear together in at least two stories, and the size of the dot is proportional to the total number of times the subject is mentioned. Like a human social network, the news tends to cluster around popular topics, and most stories are more closely related than one might think. Behind the scenes, News Dots scans all the articles from major publications-about 500 a day-and submits them to OpenCalais to identify the relevant people, places, companies, topics, etc.

I *heart* Sea - http://iheartsea.com/ - is a hyperlocal news aggregation site that collects some of the best blogs in Seattle, especially those serving the Capitol Hill area. I *heart* Sea uses OpenCalais to automatically tag the keywords of the blog posts in aggregates, to make it easier to find related information. They also use Disqus so that comments can live on many sites and stay threaded together and CommentLuv to grab recent posts from commenters’ blogs when they leave their site address.

Innovative new media monitoring and intelligence tools using OpenCalais include:

Tattler (app) - http://tattlerapp.com/ - is an open source topic monitoring tool for today’s Web. Tattler finds and aggregates content from the Web on topics users ask it to monitor. Using OpenCalais and other Semantic Web technologies, Tattler mines news, websites, blogs, multimedia sites, and other social media like Twitter, to find mentions of the issues most relevant to users’ selected topics. Built by Phase2 Technology and distributed on Drupal, Tattler’s unique workflow and a toolset of intelligent content processors make it easy for users to filter, organize, share, and take action on content gathered from the real-time Web.

Interceder - http://www.interceder.net - is a social media monitoring tool that makes it easy to track trending topics and search through the latest content from major news Web sites, blogs, Twitter and YouTube. Interceder uses the Daylife API to find to find the latest news; OpenCalais to create semantic metadata and enrich news and other Web content; Freebase to gather further insight on the people, companies and places mentioned in search results, and Yahoo! Pipes to retrieve the latest news from major news websites.

AskJot - http://www.askjot.com - Ask Jot is a tool for analyzing web pages for keywords, and displaying them as links to search results from various services around the Web. Developed by John Wright of Wright Labs and formerly known as Semantalyzr, Ask Jot uses OpenCalais to find and identify the entities on a Web page, including people, companies, countries and more. It also uses The New York Times article search API, DBPedia, the Yahoo! Answers API, the flickr API and many more.

New services using OpenCalais to deliver intelligent content experiences include:

Feedly - http://www.feedly.com - Feedly is a Firefox plug-in that brings to life user-selected inputs from Google Reader, friendfeed, Twitter, RSS feeds and more in an easy-to-read and engaging magazine-style format. In addition, Feedly aggregates users’ sharing behavior into a single page and adds a toolbar to the bottom of the page that gives them more sharing and comparing features about that page. If users click “next” in the toolbar, it will take them to another site their friends have recommended. Feedly uses OpenCalais and other semantic technologies for clustering, linking and organizing the content experience in an intuitive fashion that is nicely integrated into the browsing experience.

OpenPublish - http://www.opensourceopenminds.com/openpublish - Based on the popular open source publishing platform Drupal, OpenPublish is a next generation CMS that has been tailored to the needs of today’s online publishers. Ideal for a variety of media sites including magazines, newspapers, journals, trade publications, broadcast and wire services. Developed by Phase2 Technology, it uses semantic metatagging from OpenCalais to streamline content operations, automatically create topic hubs and recommend related articles and archived ’more from this author’ stories.

DocumentCloud - http://www.documentcloud.org - Founded by reporters from The New York Times and ProPublica, and funded by the Knight Foundation, DocumentCloud is a unique online resource that will offer public access to news reporters’ original source materials, including documents, media files and more. The materials available through DocumentCloud will be processed by OpenCalais to make it easy for users to explore connections between newsmakers, corporations, transactions and even quotations across documents and across the full collection of source information.
About the OpenCalais Initiative

The OpenCalais initiative supports the interoperability of content and advances Thomson Reuters mission to deliver intelligent information. It offers free metadata generation services, developer tools and an automatic connection to the Linked Data cloud. The free OpenCalais service and open API makes it easy to automate content operations, enhance content, increase audience engagement and extend distribution across the content ecosystem. Visit OpenCalais.com.