Filed under: news
New York Times has done a nice write-up here on technology news aggregator Techmeme, the site which geeks and industry leaders flock to daily. As Techmeme evolves and introduces the human touch, alongside its traditional software algorithms, to collect news and blog posts the Times sees potential in this aggregation model more than just the tech sector.
Techmeme could become a model for other industries as a useful way to harness the increasingly unwieldy Web and arm readers who are preparing for business meetings or cocktail parties. Techmeme, a start-up company based in San Francisco, also publishes aggregation sites for politics, celebrity gossip and baseball, and hopes to expand to topics like business or energy.
Industry-specific aggregators like Techmeme provide focused, grouped news stories which can be essential for readers requiring a succinct digest of the main topics of the day. With aggregators often getting a bad press, it is refreshing to see the benefits they offer being discussed and encouraged not only for readers but for publishers too.
July 21, 2010
Great article here from paidContent:UK analysing where UK newspaper websites get their traffic from, and coming in at number five, in terms of driving traffic, is the BBC with its Moreover-powered Newstracker service.
UK Newspaper Website Visitors
The figures look even more favourable for Moreover/the Beeb when you look exclusively at the UK numbers, putting search engines aside the BBC becomes the number one referring site for the British press driving over 1.2 million UK clicks in April of this year.
With the BBC determined to continue this trend, becoming a “window on the Web” and see its rate of referring click-throughs double by 2012, this is a great example of how aggregators like Moreover can work with and serve the publishers for a common good.
June 30, 2010
THOMSON REUTERS OPENCALAIS SEES COMMERCIAL ADOPTION FOR MEDIA MONITORING, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, READER ENGAGEMENT, CORPORATE GOVERNANCE AND MORE
Pioneering Partners Include Moreover Technologies, Morris Communications,
Media General, Magus Ltd. and Prefix Technologies
SemTech 2010 – San Francisco, Calif. – June 23, 2010 – Thomson Reuters today cited five innovative companies that are pioneering the large-scale and commercial use of its OpenCalais service to enrich and optimize digital content.
They include Moreover Technologies, a world-leading media aggregation and monitoring provider; Morris Communications and Media General, two top-tier regional publishers; Magus Ltd., the British pioneer of enterprise website governance, and Prefix, South Africa’s leading Content Management System (CMS).
“Two and a half years in, we are extremely pleased to be part of leading publishing platforms and media monitoring solutions around the world,” said Tom Tague, OpenCalais Initiative lead, Thomson Reuters. “We’re processing five million documents per day and storing 90 billion triples, reflecting a large and growing percentage of the English language news articles, blog posts and social media status updates posted on the Web every day.”
Joining CBS Interactive / CNET, Huffington Post, The New Republic, The Nation and more than 50 other publishers, entrepreneurs and service providers using OpenCalais are:
Moreover Technologies One of the original news aggregators on the Web, Moreover provides companies with “news and views” in a comprehensive solution for business intelligence, mainstream media and social media monitoring. It aggregates, refines and delivers millions of daily articles, blog posts and social media updates from more than a million editorially vetted sources spanning 800 searchable industries in 100-plus countries, and 50-plus languages.
Moreover Technologies uses OpenCalais to categorize and tag news and blog content as well as social media status updates to provide superior mainstream and social media monitoring services to clients of all kinds.
”Equally important to quantity of information is quality,” said Paul Farrell, President of Moreover Technologies. “It’s imperative to be able to retrieve rapidly the most relevant and pinpointed results possible from vast repositories of business intelligence. Our partnership with OpenCalais substantially enhances our ability to make sure clients get the right results at the right time.”
Morris Communications A leading southeastern media company, Morris Communications has newspaper, magazine, outdoor advertising, radio, book publishing and online properties. Its digital arm, Morris DigitalWorks, turned to OpenCalais while digitizing the archives of its 13 daily newspapers, including the Augusta Chronicle; the Florida Times-Union; the Savannah Morning News; the noted local Journalism experiment Bluffton Today and more.
“We strive to be unrivaled in the delivery of local news and information to our readership in every possible medium. So it is essential to be able to repurpose our content for any number of uses – including digital distribution on the Web, mobile, etc.,” said Michael Romaner, President, Morris DigitalWorks. “OpenCalais has helped us achieve that mission in two ways. By improving the relevancy of our content for Web searches, we have increased both our overall page-views from search engines, and our retention of those readers once they arrive. We look forward to expanding on this successful alliance.”
Media General A publicly-owned communications company, Media General has interests in more than 35 newspapers, 15 television stations and a wide array of interactive media properties. Media General turned to OpenCalais when porting 60 of its content-rich sites – including The Tampa Tribune; the Winston-Salem Journal; and the Richmond Times-Dispatch – to a new CMS for superior Search Engine Optimization (SEO), improved content navigation and greater utilization of archived articles.
Magus Ltd Magus is the pioneering UK company behind ActiveStandards™: the market-leading SaaS platform for enterprise website governance used by Unilever, Shell, Philips, ING and more. ActiveStandards takes web content governance to a new level by enabling companies to coordinate the policies, processes and people that underpin their web presence within a single integrated framework, and monitor and manage compliance.
Magus uses OpenCalais to power ActiveStandards’ “Content Insight Reports” – a suite of powerful semantic reports which extend the reach of online governance by providing visibility and control over unstructured content.
“Semantic Web technologies are revolutionizing the way people find and use information online,” said Simon Lande, CEO, Magus Ltd. “Our alliance with OpenCalais enables us to leverage this technology to bring about a step-change in the way that companies monitor and manage their online content. We see it as a revolution in content governance.”
Prefix Technologies Provider of South Africa’s most popular off- and online CMS, Prefix is a trusted Web-applications development company. Prefix solutions enable magazine, newspaper and online publishers to collect, store, share and monetize content in new ways that increase competitive advantage while improving efficiency and reducing costs.
Prefix uses OpenCalais as a processing layer for Preditor’s Semantic Tagging Engine. With a powerful tagging rules toolkit on a per-magazine basis, Preditor customers with multiple magazines on Preditor are able to draw content out of their archives and build smart links across a the network for their readers. In one case study, they’ve scanned through and linked over 10 years of archives.
”We’ve seen significant increases in archive monetization for our customers with our OpenCalais implementation. Equally, it’s been incredible to explore new ideas in both the print and digital worlds to create content packages through semantic discovery,” said Josh Adler, CEO, Prefix. “We feel we’ve interpreted the semantic opportunity in a unique way for traditional media and OpenCalais opened that door for us.”
About the OpenCalais Initiative
The OpenCalais initiative supports the interoperability of content and advances Thomson Reuters mission to deliver intelligent information by connecting all the world’s business-relevant content. It offers free metadata generation services, developer tools and an automatic connection to the Linked Data cloud. Found at OpenCalais.com (http://www.OpenCalais.com), OpenCalais is the fastest, easiest and most accurate way to tag the people, places, companies, facts and events in content to increase its value, accessibility and interoperability on the Web. For a quick and easy demo of how OpenCalais can add intelligence to your content, visit http://viewer.opencalsis.com, paste in a news story and hit submit.”
About Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters is the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals. We combine industry expertise with innovative technology to deliver critical information to leading decision makers in the financial, legal, tax and accounting, healthcare and science and media markets, powered by the world’s most trusted news organization. With headquarters in New York and major operations in London and Eagan, Minnesota, Thomson Reuters employs 55,000 people and operates in over 100 countries. For more information, go to thomsonreuters.com.
Contact:
Krista Thomas
Thomson Reuters OpenCalais Initiative
415.202.3523
Krista.Thomas@ThomsonReuters.com
June 29, 2010
Aggregation pioneer marks one-year milestone with new Social Media Metabase portal, expanded news coverage, new search engine tools, new publisher product, new mobile app
Reston, VA—Aggregation pioneer Moreover Technologies has moved aggressively on their mission to solidify the top spot in breadth and depth of social media and news capabilities in the year since a private investment group acquired the company from VeriSign, Inc.
According to company President Paul J. Farrell, investment team leader, “The ink on the May 2009 acquisition contract wasn’t even dry when a product team started expanding our social media and news presence to help our clients monitor what’s happening, identify trends, and use the information to enhance their customer support and marketing services. This was one facet of an overall strategy to address many challenges at once, beefing up combined news and social media monitoring and improving our analytical tools.”
Leading the way is a newly launched Social Media Metabase business intelligence portal with expanded content filtering, sharing and analysis tools. This repository includes 976,000 spam-free, editorially reviewed White List feeds providing 1.4 million average daily posts refined from more than 12 million sources. “We cover all the Web’s most prominent social media sources, commentators and discussions,” notes Product Manager Brian Mackie. “A year ago, the Metabase contained 250,000 feeds, chiefly blogs and podcasts, with 500,000 posts. That’s a 280 percent increase in posts coupled with a 390 percent increase in sources.”
Moreover’s social media universe includes forums, microblogs, consumer review sites, video and photo sharing sites, wikis, social networks and comments, including such key sites as YouTube and Twitter.
The new Metabase portal provides detailed source lists and indexing statistics, giving customers more detailed insight into coverage. Other enhancements include comprehensive categorization and metadata tying to country, language, publishing platform, topic and media type. Quantity of tagged feeds, and countries, languages and platforms covered is constantly growing. Currently, Moreover indexes more than 100 countries and 50 languages.
Also noteworthy is the impending combination of the Social Media Metabase and News Metabase into one portal. “Having the news and social media all in one place will provide clients the ability to understand connections between the content. This shows metrics we can support, analysis of data returned, most linked sources, and the most salient pieces,” emphasizes Mackie.
News coverage also is up considerably, with 218 percent growth in average daily article count to 600,000 from 275,000; and with a 15 percent increase to 35,000 sources.
Farrell notes, “To help fuel our growth, Moreover has more than doubled the size of our client service team, enabling our clients to filter through all the noise and identify the information they are seeking.”
Moreover Technologies’ Search Engine Toolkit (SET) now offers a search API across all news and social media types (versus just news a year ago), offering “direct query access to our index for custom feeds and search implementations,” says Mackie. “It’s fairly plug-and-play, and goes in some pretty fancy directions. We can provide very specific content by topic, news and social classifications.”
Other value-added applications, such as Moreover’s Newsdesk, sit on top of SET. Newsdesk provides an intuitive dashboard that enables access to breaking Web news and fast creation of branded information-sharing tools such as newsletters.
Responding to publisher interest in monitoring and complementing how and where their Web content appears, Moreover Technologies has developed the MetaMonitor content discovery application. MetaMonitor enables publishers to compare and contrast details of original and republished content. “It’s a great analytical tool for publishers,” notes Farrell.
Rounding out first-year accomplishments, Moreover Technologies also launched an iPhone application as part of a wider mobile strategy.
For more information, contact Ryan Roe at salesinfo(at)moreover(dot)com.
###
Since 1998, Moreover Technologies has been a trusted aggregator of global news and social media. Through US and UK offices, the firm offers corporate customers worldwide direct access to comprehensive, yet targeted, real-time business and consumer information from the Web’s most read and respected sources. Daily, Moreover Technologies aggregates two million news articles and social media posts from more than a million editorially vetted sources across 100+ countries, 50+ languages and 800+ searchable industry categories (statistics as of June 2010).
June 9, 2010
Organized or Overwhelmed? Almost universally, employees feel frustrated and overwhelmed when they can’t put their hands on needed business intelligence quickly.
Compounding the situation today is the widespread expectation that people will be able to find and share information rapidly, given the rise of digital files and explosion of mobile as well as on-site communication and collaboration options.
In a paper world, hours or even days might have been the accepted standard. Now, it’s often minutes—or even seconds.
A clear message emerges from all this: Information that’s well-organized and easily accessible by all authorized users will drive up employee productivity and customer satisfaction ratings.
Conversely, employees underperforming for any reason, including frustration over lack of organization, are costing companies a lot of time, which translates into money.
World-famous Gallup, the polling company, notes that in an average organization, 40% of employees aren’t performing optimally (based on a ratio of 1.5 engaged for every 1 disengaged employee). In contrast, world-class organizations have an 8:1 ratio, according to Gallup findings.
Other findings show that when someone is interrupted by a distraction, such as trying to find information in a disorganized venue, it takes roughly a half-hour to get back on track.
Conversely, according to a survey from the Global intelligence Alliance (GIA), a global market intelligence firm, “Systematically organized market intelligence operations report time savings of at least 1.5 hours per week per end-user…about 9.5 days a year per end-user.”
That’s a lot of money annually PER employee. This addresses the importance of having an organized, digital way to access and use information. In content aggregation, monitoring and sharing, this leads to several conclusions:
1. Having a single-source provider of all business intelligence—news, social media, and even non-feed articles—helps companies organize and keep track better than when multiple suppliers are involved;
2. Digital trumps paper in so many ways—speed of getting information in and sending it out, mobile access, ability to filter and refine relevant business intelligence from huge numbers of sources, articles and posts…the list goes on and on;
3. User-friendly digital distribution tools play a major role in the well-organized workplace. Ability to capture and re-distribute business intelligence rapidly and reliably saves time, money…and sanity.
May 21, 2010
Respected research and advisory firm for the information industry, Outsell, have taken a look at our new content discovery application product MetaMonitor and been impressed with the way MetaMonitor builds upon the existing Moreover framework.
MetaMonitor serves to allow publishers to track and compare their original content across our ever-growing list of 35,000 news sources and 800,000 social media sources. Publishers can match original work to derivative content, identifying who is using what, how they are using it and where, allowing for fair attribution and the engagement of prospective partners.
What so captivated Outsell was Moreover’s ability to take our core offering, the News Metabase, but with additional development time to productize it in a fresh and different manner, adding value with a targeted product extension. Outsell subscribers can read the full article here: https://clients.outsellinc.com/insights/?p=11193 and we look forward to sharing more exciting product news with you all soon!
May 17, 2010
The Internet is all abuzz at the moment as the battle lines between media monitoring group Meltwater and Rupert Murdoch become clearer, with the media mogul’s UK flagship the Times Online now blocking Meltwater from indexing Times Online content.
Blog site paidContent:UK broke the story and, as ever, does a thorough write-up on the facts. They report how the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA), owned by the major UK publishers, recently introduced a licensing system allowing online access to member sites to those companies signing up for the online use license.
With Meltwater being the only non-NLA compliant agency, and now this action from Murdoch’s News International, it is shaping up to be an interesting year for copyright as the publishing industry adapts to the changes in the online marketplace.
March 18, 2010
Real-time search has become an increasingly popular web trend over the past twelve months, one we’ve covered a number of times here on the blog, so it was of little surprise when the major search engines started integrating Twitter and the likes into their search results. What is a little surprising however though is the impact, or lack of, these real-time results are so far having on our searching habits.
Oneupweb have carried out an eye-opening eye-tracking study into the effectiveness of real-time web search results. The study split a group of users into “consumers” searching for products you would consider buying or “foragers” looking for current news and information on a topic. The results were mixed to say the least:
73% had never heard of real-time results before participating this study.
Only a quarter of the consumers cared for the real-time results compared to 47% of the information foragers.
The report also showed the users took more than ten seconds to to settle their gaze on the real-time results, but the foragers were more willing to spend time on the page which could be indicative of their willingness to consider more options before clicking and hence their increased likelihood to test the real-time results.
So the results perhaps don’t show real-time search to be quite as popular as the buzz may suggest – not yet anyway, but as users adapt the social aspect of search will become ever more relevant as real-time becomes a reality.
March 10, 2010
Exciting news from the team here at Moreover, we’ve released our first iPhone app into the wild and are eager to hear what you think of it!
The app allows users to keep up-to-date with breaking sport headlines from global news sources across 25 different sport news feeds including football (soccer and American), baseball, basketball, Formula 1, golf, tennis and many more. You can also browse through the top sports stories of the day or search the news for the latest views and scores on your favourite team or athlete.
Behind the scenes the app is constantly checking the Web’s news sites for breaking headlines and links back to them whenever you click a headline. The Moreover Sport News app covers sport-specific and local news sites, along with the familiar sites such as the BBC and ESPN we all know, so whatever your sport we’ve got it covered.
Other features include a “more stories like this” functionality, email this article and post to Facebook.
Download the app here and be sure to leave us any feedback you have in the comments section below!
January 14, 2010
Just in time for Christmas we have unwrapped a few goodies in Newsdesk that we hope will deliver a little bit of festive cheer!
In a final Newsdesk update for 2009 we are adding a splash of colour to things by including news images alongside headlines, where available, and displaying source favicons next to source names in both news and social media search results.
Newsdesk source and favicon images.
Also in this update is the added functionality to now search over news sources from individual US States, complimenting the existing UK Counties search filter. So should the focus of your query only be based around New England sources then this update allows you to quickly and easily isolate those news sites relevant to you.
As mentioned in our previous post the social media content and coverage is continuing to grow, so alongside the news content Newsdesk provides a complete media monitoring package. Should you have any questions or feedback on these changes please let us know!
December 18, 2009
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