Semantics in Publishing & Media

SEMANTICS IN PUBLISHING & MEDIA:
RECENT RESEARCH RESULTS
SEMANTIC TECHNOLOGY CONFERENCE 2010
RACHEL LOVINGER
@RLOVINGER

© 2010 Razorfish. All rights reserved.

ABOUT ME: RACHEL LOVINGER

‣ Content Strategy Lead, Razorfish, NYC
‣ Previously worked on websites at Time Inc.
‣ Five years speaking at SemTech
‣ Co-editor of scatter/gather, a content
strategy blog:
http://scattergather.razorfish.com

‣ Started a Semantic Web affinity group
‣ Author of Nimble: A Razorfish Report on
Publishing in the Digital Age

© 2010 Razorfish. All rights reserved.
Photo by Rohanna Mertens

BACKGROUND

3 © 2010 Razorfish. All rights reserved.

‣ A rich source of information and practical advice about how to use semantic
technologies in business and consumer applications

‣ A really good place to become educated about the foundational concepts and
technologies of semantics

‣ Organizers of SemTech 2010

‣ Visit their booth in the exhibit hall for more information


‣ Creates experiences that build businesses. Pioneers and recognized experts
around a user-centered, insight-driven approach to designing web experiences
‣ With a demonstrated commitment to innovation, Social Influence Marketing,
emerging media, creative design, analytics, technology and user experience
‣ One of the largest interactive marketing and technology companies in the world,
with offices in 9 U.S. cities, Latin America, Europe and Asia/Pacific:
- Atlanta - Berlin
- Austin, TX - Frankfurt
- Chicago - London
- Los Angeles - Madrid
- New York - Paris
- Philadelphia - Hong Kong
- Portland, OR - Shanghai
- San Francisco - Singapore
- Seattle - Sydney
- São Paulo, Brazil - Tokyo

Photo by Rachel Lovinger

RESEARCH QUESTION

How can the needs of
Media & Entertainment
companies be supported by
semantic technologies?


WHY MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT?

‣ Content is the core business, but often the content lacks structure.

‣ Proliferation of content sources fight for audience attention.

‣ Waning revenue makes it desirable to explore daring new approaches.

‣ Emerging delivery platforms require content to be served in new ways.


MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT INTERVIEWS

‣ Nic Newman
Talking Points Memo

‣ Josh Marshall ‣ Tony Ageh
‣ Simon Nelson

‣ Martin Nisenholtz
‣ Michael Zimbalist ‣ Jim Stanley
‣ Rob Larson
‣ Evan Sandhaus
‣ John Squires
‣ Gordon McLeod


WHY SEMANTIC TECHNOLOGY?

‣ An emerging set of standards and tools that need User Experience experts.
‣ Existing semantic technologies could provide a lot of benefits to these
companies.
‣ Some Media & Entertainment properties are already starting to work with these
technologies.


SEMANTIC TECHNOLOGY INTERVIEWS
Dean Allemang, Chief Scientist, TopQuadrant, Inc.

Scott Brinker, President and CTO, ion interactive

Christine Connors, Principal, TriviumRLG LLC

Robert Cook, Founder, Freebase and Metaweb

Mills Davis, Founder and Managing Director, Project10X

Bob DuCharme, semantic web guy, TopQuadrant, Inc.

Paul Miller, Consultant, Cloud of Data

Alan Morrison, Sr. Research Fellow, PriceWaterhouseCoopers

Brian Sletten, Senior Platform Engineer, Riot Games

Nova Spivack, Founder and CEO, Radar Networks

David Weinberger, Consultant and Author, Everything is Miscellaneous


A Razorfish Research Report

NIMBLE


WHY NIMBLE?

‣ Being nimble is about:

‣ Business models
‣ Production processes
‣ The content itself


BEING NIMBLE MEANS…

‣ Being able to take advantage of new partnerships and revenue opportunities
as soon as they arise

‣ Being able to serve content on all different channels and devices

‣ Being able to develop new content products and services faster, easier, and
less expensively


CONTENT NEEDS TO BE FREE
(LIKE A BIRD, NOT LIKE BEER)


Simply put, digital content
needs to be free – to go where
and when people want it most.


In particular, content has to be
mobile, and it has to be social.


ESCAPING THE CONTAINER

Digital media
doesn’t have the
same physical
constraints as
traditional media


Column inches

Photo by Michael @ NW Lens

Number of pages

Photo by inky

Bits & Minutes

Photo by luis vasquez

Grooves in vinyl

Photo by Tatian

Time slots

Source: The Futon Critic

WE DON’T HAVE THE SAME LIMITATIONS FOR DIGITAL

3 hours
3 minutes

620 pages

102 characters

BBC © MMX, Jason Scott, Semantic Universe, and Argus Pacific, Inc.

QUESTION YOUR AUTHORITY


“Technologies always come
along and challenge who and what
we think we are, and the value of
what ‘experts’ do for us.”
– Tony Ageh, Controller of Archive Development, BBC


WHAT’S THE UNIQUE BUSINESS VALUE OF THE
BRAND?

Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company
‣ A shipping/mail delivery company
‣ Couldn’t compete with trains
‣ A ferry company
‣ Couldn’t compete with airplanes
‣ A cruise company
‣ A small percentage of their earlier business

Is it about owning ships, or about transporting things?
Transporting things, or people?

Photo by Roger Marks

WHAT ROLE WILL THE EDITOR PLAY?

Source: Bill on Capital Hill

HOW VALUABLE IS THE CONTENT? TO WHOM?

‣ Expectation that digital
content will be free
‣ Advertisers can’t reach the
same audiences, because
attention is to fragmented
‣ Ad budgets for traditional
media are waning,
‣ Digital ad spend is on the
rise, but slow

Internet spend compared with U.S. marketing spend.
Dollars in billions. Source: ZenithOptimedia.com


WHERE DOES CONTENT RESIDE AND HOW
DOES IT GET THERE?

In 2000 a digital publisher’s
content ecosystem included a
website, an RSS feed, and
maybe an email newsletter.

In 2010 there are many more
content channels to attend to.


WHERE DOES A BRAND FIND ITS AUDIENCE?

‣ People rely on
‣ trusted editorial sources
‣ editorial aggregators
‣ community aggregators
‣ personal filters
‣ social recommendations
‣ They still struggle
‣ They still worry that they’re missing
something


STRUCTURE SETS CONTENT FREE

Ironically, it’s more structure that makes content nimble and sets it free. Not the
kind of blind structure that defines the layout of a web page, but tags that express
the meaning and function of each individual element in a content item.


STRUCTURED DATA

‣ Markup that provides more meaning and context

‣ Ad hoc and standard methods of adding structure

‣ Microformats


This presentation was given
on 2010-06-23
at the Semantic Technology Conference
in San Francisco, California.

STRUCTURED DATA

‣ Standard methods of adding structure
‣ Dublin Core – an ISO standard defining 15 common metadata elements
‣ FOAF (Friend of a Friend) – relationships between people
‣ RDF – a model for expressing metadata as triples
‣ OWL – adds semantic meaning
‣ SKOS – expresses structured controlled vocabularies, taxonomies


UNIQUE IDS

‣ People can usually tell by context, but a machine needs a unique identifier to
be able to make connections or distinctions
‣ Every person, place or thing has its own ID

Bill Clinton = President Bush President Bush
President William Jefferson Clinton (George H. W.) (George W.)


ONE PAGE PER CONCEPT

‣ High SEO value
‣ Aggregates content
‣ Mapped to related data

BBC © MMX

BBC MUSIC BETA – ARTISTS PAGES

BBC © MMX

LINKED DATA

Image by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch

BEYOND LAYOUT

‣ Tagging systems that express:
‣ Usage – which get fed to the mobile app, what part gets extracted as a
tweet, which bits are sent to a Facebook page
‣ Trust – source of information, and where they fit in your circle
‣ Value & Entitlements - which parts are free for everyone, which parts are
premium, which are available only to mobile subscribers
‣ Versioning – managing variations on content you already possess


APIS FOR CONTENT, DATA, AND FUNCTION

‣ Import data, content, and
services
‣ Make content and data
available for use by others

Photo by Rishi Menon

IMAGINE A NIMBLE WORLD


THE EDITOR BECOMES A CURATOR

‣ Oversee living,
growing nimble
content and data.

‣ Create better
experiences
ongoing stories.

‣ Use archived
content to add
new context and
meaning.


BLOGS KNOW THIS

Copyright © 2010 bOING bOING and HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

REACHING INTO THE ARCHIVES

Source: Gizmodo

LIVING STORIES

© 2010 Google

RELATED CONTENT SERVICES

© 2010 Time Inc.

RELATED CONTENT SERVICES

Example Services
Apture Provides additional contextual information in multimedia pop-ups, drawn
from places such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Flickr.

Evri Allows readers to browse articles, images, and videos related to the topic
of an article or content element, and provides widgets for sidebars, posts
and popovers.

Headup Provides contextually relevant material from social networks and web
services.

NewsCred Augments content with related stories from 6000 top news sources, as
well as topic pages and license-free photos.

Zemanta Suggests related content and pictures that editors can embed in articles
or blog posts.


ADVANCED MEDIA MONITORING

© 2010 Phase 2 Technology

ADVANCED MEDIA MONITORING

Example Services
Imooty Tracks keywords and mentions of a brand, using a simple dashboard or
by creating alerts, widgets, or RSS feeds.

Inbenta Follow the topics that people in your business are following.

Lexalytics Scans what’s being said in blogs, tweets and social media to provide
sentiment analysis about companies, topics and current events.

Tattler Mines news, websites, blogs, multimedia sites, and social media to find
mentions of topics or issues of interest to you.


DEVELOP A PORTFOLIO OF REVENUE MODELS

‣ Paid Content
‣ Advertising
‣ Other Revenue
‣ Reduce Costs


PAID CONTENT: CONTENT AS A SERVICE

The value of content will lie
in being able to provide a
desired product or service,
not just the content itself.


ITUNES – 10 BILLION SONGS

Copyright © 2010 Apple Inc.

WALL STREET JOURNAL

Copyright ©2010 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

NETFLIX

© 2010 Netflix, inc.

MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL

© 2001-2010 MLB Advanced Media, L.P.

NEXT ISSUE MEDIA


SEMANTIC PUBLISHING TOOLS

‣ Add structure + metadata
‣ Develop new products more
quickly & easily

Screenshot © 2010 Thomson Reuters

SEMANTIC PUBLISHING TOOLS

Example Services
OpenPublish A version of Drupal with OpenCalais machine assisted tagging and
RDFa formatting built in.

Jiglu Insight Finds hidden relationships to other content you’ve published and
automatically creates links.


ONLINE ADVERTISING: LOOKING UP

Need to overcome the impression that online inventory is not valuable

Source: eMarketer, May 2010

ADVERTISING: RICH, RELEVANT, TARGETED

New opportunities for
high-value advertising will
include unique approaches that
use the digital content itself.


MAD MEN AD WITH NYT CONTENT

Source: The New York Times Corporation

INTEL AD ON CNET

Source: ClickZ

LOS ANGELES TIMES

‣ Front Page, Print Edition, March 5, 2010
‣ Includes recent articles

Copyright © 2010 Tribune Inc.

LOS ANGELES TIMES: GREEN LINKS

Copyright © 2010 Tribune Inc.

ADVERTISING: TARGETED ADS

Ads that are contextually
relevant to the content can be
more engaging and ultimately
more effective.


SPONSORED RESULTS

Copyright © 2010 Yahoo! Inc.

BROAD MATCHING: TRAVEL

Copyright © 2010 The New York Times Company

THEMATIC MATCHING: TRAVEL

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

THEMATIC MATCHING: MUSIC & THEATER

Copyright © 2000–2010 Time Out New York

SPONSORED LINKS: NAME MATCHING

Copyright © 2010 Entertainment Weekly

MATCHING IS HIT OR MISS


ADVERTISING: POOR MATCHING

Automated keyword matching
can lead to some unfortunate
associations, which tends
to scare advertisers.


THE BRAND LOOKS SILLY

Source: The New York Times

THE BRAND MADE PEOPLE SICK

Copyright © 2010 Reurers

ASSOCIATED WITH DISASTER

Source: Pro PR

PROMOTING A COMPETITOR


Photo by jkenning

ADVERTISING: BRAND PROTECTION

Semantic ad targeting tools
include protection against
unfortunate term-matching.


SEMANTIC AD TARGETING

Example Services
ad pepper Provides ad placement, lead generation and brand protection through
semantic analysis of page content and user behavior.

Peer39 Understands the meaning and sentiment of web pages so that ads can
be targeted to appropriate audiences, and also protects advertisers from
having their campaigns placed on negative or objectionable content.
Identifies hot topics on the fly, and quickly adapts to create new
“premium” inventory.

Proximic Performs real-time content analysis to accurately target ads, builds user
profiles for better audience targeting, and includes brand protection
measures.


OTHER SOURCES OF REVENUE

Model by Scott Brinker

PARTNERING ON PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

‣ Partner with developers who need a regular stream of high quality content to
make their products useful.
‣ Licensing Model. Provide content to partners in exchange for a fee.
‣ Marketplace Model. Make content available to developers in exchange
for a portion of the revenue from products they develop.


VALUE-ADD APPROACH

‣ Offer free content that drives sales of paid services, products, or devices.

Source: Betanews, Inc.

RICH DATA SERVICES

Example Services
Factual An open data platform providing tools to enable anyone to contribute and
use sources of structured data.

Freebase An open, semantically enhanced database of information, similar to
Wikipedia, but with structured data on millions of topics in dozens of
domains.

iGlue A community editable database containing images, video, individuals,
institutions, and geographic locations.


REDUCE COSTS: DO MORE WITH LESS

‣ Follow the principle “produce once, use multiple times.”

‣ Use tools that help automate parts of the process.

‣ Make production processes more efficient so you can produce more content, in
more formats, often with a smaller staff.


“What [linked data] will let you
do on the back end is pretty
revolutionary. It lets you answer
questions, not that you couldn’t
answer before, but [for which] it
would have been way too hard to
collect, sanitize and curate the data.”
– Evan Sandhaus, Semantic Technologist, R&D Lab, The New York Times


MACHINE-ASSISTED TAGGING

Example Services
OpenCalais Automatically tags people, places, companies, facts and events found in
the content.

TextWise Generates weighted, relevant metadata based on key concepts found in
the text of a document or web page.

Tagaroo An OpenCalais plug-in for WordPress.


BECOME A CONTENT DISTRIBUTOR

‣ Channels

‣ Devices

‣ Platforms


2010: iPad
Photo by Christian Van Der Henst S.

2011: Gestural interface
Source: Fast Company

2016: Holodeck
Image by Corey Sauve

BE PREPARED

‣ Create unique modes of interaction and the optimal types of experiences for
each platform

‣ Content must be nimble in order to:
‣ reduce development time for current and next generation devices
‣ anticipate the needs of platforms that don’t even exist yet
‣ make everything seamlessly work together


FIND YOUR AUDIENCE WHERE THEY ARE


SEO GOES INTO OVERDRIVE

Yahoo, Google, and Bing have all begun using rich metadata embedded in pages
to apply formatting for specific kinds of content and display useful information
right in the results.


SEMANTIC SEO

Example Services
Google Rich Tests webpage markup to ensure that Google’s Rich Snippets feature
Snippets can interpret it correctly.
Testing Tool
Inbenta Assists in the creation of content using the terminology of popular
search queries.

Semantify Provides automated semantic enhancement of a site without changing
(by Dapper) its pages. Search engines see the site with RDFa tagging embedded
in the page.


STRUCTURED SERENDIPITY
ME + FRIENDS + COMMUNITY + EDITORS
‣ Tools that use all of these filters to help
people manage their information
streams

‣ Content has to play well in this
environment


“The old portal model has given
way to a social model, and you
have to have your content
threaded into that.”
– Martin Nisenholtz, SVP, Digital Operations, The New York Times


SOCIAL INFLUENCE: AUDIENCE AMBASSADORS

Pages should be properly structured, marked up, and tagged so that when that
link shows up on Facebook it includes meaningful copy and imagery


CONCLUSION

Successful publishers
‣ Understand and harness the
relationship with their audience
‣ Develop new, engaging products
for them
‣ Provide content in a wide range
of formats, platforms, and
experiences
‣ Invest in the emerging
technologies that best align with
their business strategies

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

‣ Research and Editorial Team
‣ Christine Costello, Rachel Lovinger, Melissa Sepe
‣ Advisory Board
‣ Eric Moore, Elliott Trice, Ray Velez, Domenic Venuto
‣ Art Director
‣ Lian Chang
‣ Designed by
‣ Chelsea Andrews
‣ Colleagues who gave valuable feedback and assistance
‣ Bryan Hamilton, Michael Harper, Nick Heasman, Ruth Kaufman, Beth
Lind, Rupa Naipaul, Paul Tavernise


THE DETAILS

‣ Available at:
http://nimble.razorfish.com

‣ Follow us on Twitter: @NimbleRF

‣ Illustrations by Fogelson-Lubliner
(http://fogelson-lubliner.com)


QUESTIONS?

Rachel.Lovinger@razorfish.com
Twitter: @rlovinger
Nimble Twitter: @NimbleRF
http://nimble.razorfish.com
http://scattergather.razorfish.com


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Semantics in Publishing & Media

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