Thomson Reuters releases new version of semantic tagging tool

Posted by Martin Stabe on 19 May 2008 at 08:56
Tags: Agencies, New Media, Online

Thomson Reuters has released a new version of its semantic tagging tool Open Calais along with plugins for several blogging and content management systems.

The new version of the software, which allows web publishers to automatically add metadata indicating the people, companies, places, events mentioned in their stories, was unvielled at the SemTech 2008 conference in California.

Also released at the same event were Tagaroo, an Open Calais plugin for WordPress blogging software, an Open Calais module for the content management system Drupal, and Yahoo!’s new search developer platform SearchMonkey.

Last month, the Open Calais was used at the Telegraph’s Developer Weekend to create a tool that automatically categorises news stories in RSS feeds.

Update: The new version of Calais will fix the tool’s previous emphasis on business terminology, ReadWriteWeb reports. The changes will make the tool more useful for those covering media, music, entertainment and sports, as well as pharmaceuticals, medicine and healthcare.

Google Maps mashup, Open Calais tagger and Adobe Air toolbar take Telegraph Developer Weekend prizes

Posted by Martin Stabe on 28 April 2008 at 08:47
Tags: New Media, Telegraph.co.uk, telegraph

Philip Skinner of onlinegalleries.com won the first prize at the web developers’ competition held by the Telegraph this weekend.

Skinner’s winning entry, which netted him £600 in vouchers for Apple products, was a mashup that combines YouTube videos and Telegraph.co.uk news stories on a Google Map.

Mark Ng (a consultant to PressGazette.co.uk and the creator of the previous version of this site) won second place for a tool that categorises Telegraph content — along with feeds from BBC News and Google News — using Reuters’ semantic tagging software Open Calais and creates custom RSS feeds for each tag.

A team that developed a Telegraph toolbar written in Adobe AIR
won third place.

The second and third-place winners took home £400 of Apple vouchers.

Other entries included:

• An application that took keywords from the Telegraph’s motoring RSS feed and searched Google Images to find pictures related to the article.
• A downloadable Telegraph RSS reader, video player and offline reader, which Telegraph CIO Paul Cheesbrough described as a “very professional looking application that we’ll certainly take forwards”.
• A desktop widget for viewing Telegraph RSS feeds.
• A tool to attach a blog to Telegraph stories.
• A program to tag videos and finds relevant related search results from Google while the video is playing

Representatives of some of the Telegraph’s technology partners demonstrated some applications of the technologies they had demonstrated on the first day of the competition

Google presented a tool that uses its translation software to automatically translate Telegraph stories into several languages. Adobe, meanwhile, showed off a Telegraph RSS reader.

Telegraph developers weekend: Morning highlights

Posted by Martin Stabe on 26 April 2008 at 13:44
Tags: Telegraph.co.uk

This morning’s presentations from Digg, Google, Adobe and Apple have provided some inspiration for potential Telegraph applications.

So far, we’ve heard about Digg’s API, iGoogle, Google Earth, Open Social, Adobe AIR or development tools for iPhone or iPod Touch.

I’ve already mentioned the Google presentation (and have been Twittering some other things). Here are some highlights from the other presentations:

• Apple’s Paul Burford says Safari now has 71 per cent market share in the US mobile browser market. He shows off the iPhone OS and the iPhone developer tools. A new “App Store” will be the only way for end users to load applications onto the phone. The reason, he says, is that this is to protect users from applications that are badly written or do malicious things.
• Adobe’s Xavier Agnetti shows off an Adobe AIR project, currently under development, which will let customers of fashion etailer Anthropologie search its product range by picking a colour from a palette or picking a colour from a local image.
• Digg’s Matt Van Horn shows off how Digg drives traffic to news sites, such as when an eight-year-old Guardian story about Astronaut sex suddenly went viral or how the New York Times’ traffic from Digg grew after its added Digg buttons. More

The visiting developers are now being taken for a tour of the Telegraph newsroom or for lunch.

This afteroon, they will disperse to training sessions with Google, Adobe and APple before the tomorrow’s developer competition is launched this afternoon.

Telegraph developer weekend: Showing off the possibilites of Google Earth

Posted by Martin Stabe on 26 April 2008 at 12:15
Tags: Google, Google Maps, Online, Telegraph.co.uk, telegraph

Google’s Chewy Trewhella been presenting the sort of things are possible with the search giant’s various APIs, particularly the geographic mashups in Google Earth.

he acknowledges that despite the vast data available on Google Earth, the company has been having difficulty keeping people interested in using the tool beyond a few initial experiments.

He shows off some projects that use Google Earth to display the sort of information that might be interesting to a news site:

• Property website Nestoria used the Google mapping API to build its site and plot different layers of information in various neighbourhoods.
• A tool that explains the tomb of Tutankhamun in three dimensions.
• A layer that shows global oil consumption as a bar graph where each country’s height reflects its consumption.
• A layer that shows the effects of rising sea levels. He demonstrates that if the sea level ere to rise by 20m, the Google and Telegraph offices in Victoria would be one tiny island of dry land in London.
• Fboweb.com plots aircraft flight data in real time, plotting airplanes’ locations and flightpaths with planes at the correct altitude.

Telegraph Labs hosts web developer open house weekend

Posted by Martin Stabe on 26 April 2008 at 11:19
Tags: Online

Telegraph Labs, the Telegraph web development team’s unit that experiments with new tools, is hosting a developer weekend today and tomorrow.

This morning, there will be a number of presentations and training sessions followed by a development competition tomorrow.

As you would expect from an event like this, there will be plenty of live blogging, Twittering, and photo posting on Flickr.

Telegraph chief information officer Paul Cheesbrough opened the weekend by stressing that like all newspapers, the Telegraph is “undergoing a quiet revolution”, where the average age, particularly of the technology team, is being driven down.

The new Telegraph Labs, he says, will be developing new products to launch The Telegraph is creating a space for the Telegraph Labs to create new ideas and products to launch online.

Some of the results of this weekend are likely to developed further under the Telegraph Labs brand he stresses

“We really want a close link with the development community,” he says.

Cheesbrough’s introduction will be followed this morning with presentations from representatives of Google, Adobe, Digg, and Apple.

Updates to follow all day, both here and at the great blog run by Telegraph communities editor Shane Richmond…

Plymouth Herald starts Twittering

Posted by Martin Stabe on 15 April 2008 at 15:18
Tags: twitter

The Plymouth Herald is the latest newspaper to use Twitter to keep its readers informed about the latest news.

Unlike many other news sites (including Press Gazette) that use Twitterfeed to push its RSS feeds into Twitter, the is publishing custom messages to its readers.

The Herald also has profile pages to reach readers who use social networking sites.

Online editor Neil Shaw says the paper has amassed more than 800 friends on Facebook, with 400 in a Facebook group, 475 on MySpace and 200 on Bebo.

British entries shortlisted for Knight journalism grants

Posted by Martin Stabe on 1 April 2008 at 09:14
Tags: Journalism, Online

Birmingham City University journalism lecturer Paul Bradshaw and former BBC journalist Nick Booth are among the finalists in the the Knight News Challenge, an annual competition run by Knight Foundation to fund innovation in online journalism with grants of up to $5 million (£2.5m).

Bradshaw, author of the Online Journalism Blog and occasional contributor to Press Gazette, is the only British entrant to have reached the final stage — and the only finalist with two separate projects up for consideration.

In one of his entries, Bradshaw and Booth are seeking $200,000 (£100,000) to fund Citizen Investigation, a website that will allow users to assign and pursue investigative journalism projects with the support of professional journalists.

In their other shortlisted entry, they are seeking $250,000 (£125,000) to fund “The conversation toolkit“, a series of plugins for websites to allow online news publishers to implement social networking, mapping and other functionality outlined by Bradshaw in a much-cited blog post, “The News Diamond“, and “Five W’s and a H“, which advocates a new way of producing about news stories online.

The winners of the grants will be announced on 14 May at the Editor & Publisher Interactive Media Conference in Las Vegas.

Gavin O’Reilly responds to Google on ACAP

Posted by Martin Stabe on 13 March 2008 at 07:00
Tags: ACAP, Google

The consortium of publishing groups behind the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP) has responded to comments made about the project yesterday by Google’s head of media and publishing partnerships for Europe, Rob Jonas.

ACAP seeks to establish a new technical standard for allowing website publishers to specify different levels of access they wish to grant search engines’ indexing software. The group argues that the existing standard, known as the Robots Exclusion Standard (or “robots.txt”) is insufficient.

Jonas told yesterday’s MediaGuardian Changing Media Summit that “the general view within the company is that the robots.txt provides everything most publishers need to do.

Gavin O’Reilly, the chairman of the World Association of Newspapers and COO of Independent News & Media responded in a statement:

It’s strange for Google to be telling publishers what they should think about robots.txt when publishers worldwide across the sector have already very clearly told Google that they disagree. If Google’s reason for not supporting ACAP is that they think publishers should have a different view then we would ask Google to respect the fact that after considerable consideration and work we have identified not only the inadequacies of robots.txt but also come up with a practical and open solution. We call upon Google to adopt ACAP as soon as possible and respect the right of content owners to determine how their content is used.

Last November, Times Online became the first newspaper website to adopt ACAP.

Shortlists revealed for online categories in British Press Awards

Posted by Martin Stabe on 4 March 2008 at 15:03
Tags: British Press Awards, Online

The shortlist for the 2008 British Press Awards was released today.

For the first time, the Awards included a new category of “digital journalist of the year” and a new “website of the year” award.

Digital Journalist of the Year

• Sean Smith - The Guardian
• Toby Harnden - Daily Telegraph
• Daniel Finkelstein - The Times
• Declan Walsh - The Guardian
• Clancy Chassay - The Guardian
• Chrystia Freeland - Financial Times

Website of the Year

• Telegraph.co.uk
• Sun Online
• Guardian.co.uk
• Mail Online
• Mirror.co.uk
• Times Online

@DNA2008: Sky News to embed SkyCast video sharing tool

Posted by Martin Stabe on 4 March 2008 at 09:21
Tags: Sky, Sky News, Sky.com, User-Generated Content, skynews, video

Sky News plans to embed a white-label version of Sky’s video sharing tool, SkyCast, into news pages on to encourage user submissions of video.

Sky News associate editor Simon Bucks noted the move in a panel on user-submitted content at the DNA conference in Brussels today.

Sky News already has a still photo sharing section on its web site called YourPhoto.