Washington Times amongst newspapers putting semantic technologies to work with help from Inform Technologies

The press release describes Inform as;

"a 'journalistic' technology solution for media companies that works as an extra editor, intelligently mining and linking content from sites, archives and the Web overall. The solution automatically creates links within content, as well as new, topic-specific Web pages. The result is that media-company Websites become deeper and richer, encouraging readers to spend more time and view more pages. This gives the media companies opportunities for additional revenue."

Solomon talked of the Times’ site refresh back in May of this year, describing Inform’s capabilities as underpinning

“one of the key focal points of our strategy.”

He talked of a desire to move from the static delivery of news toward becoming an interactive site that gave the reader an opportunity to control their receipt of news.

This strategy for revamping the site back in May comprised several main elements, with semantic technologies playing an enabling role in each;

• the News Cube
• Support for online communities
• News ‘themes’

The first of these, the News Cube, offers a very visible means of ‘controlling’ the news experience. Visitors to the Washington Times home page are able to click left and right to visibly change the headline story, or access Related Themes and Related Stories to dig deeper behind the news of the day. The related themes and stories are all provided, automatically, by Inform’s polling of the Times’ own back catalogue and the wire services to which it has licensed access.

With their communities, the Times seeks to create a social network around the news, with Inform delivering feeds of relevant content and a civilian moderator shaping a conversation amongst all those interested in the topic at hand.

Finally Inform powers some 400,000 news themes, which Solomon describes as;

“narrow streams of news... [that] encourage readers to dive into a story... go[ing] deeper than they otherwise would.”

Challenged on the oft-repeated assumption that narrow-casting of this sort leads to self-selecting and increasingly selective groups that only see validations of their own world view, Solomon argued that the Times’ statistics suggest

“narrow-casting has broadened the amount of news that people consume.”

Page-views have almost tripled during this year, and average visit duration has increased from under two minutes to over four.

At the heart of this, Inform plays a role in adding value to the basic building blocks of any newspaper or news web site; the story. Stories are written as usual, and then passed automatically to Inform for analysis. The finished stories return to the paper for publication, complete with markup that links from key people, places, companies and subjects to previous stories and automatically generated overarching ‘theme’ pages; these are the links made prominent on the home page by the News Cube.

Solomon discussed the time saved by editorial staff, who previously generated the ‘see also’-type links to accompany their articles by hand. He also highlighted the power of increasing access to the paper’s own back catalogue for its editorial staff, commenting on the added richness and context that this could bring to their writing.

“Our editors now have the capability to use these news themes... to inform a story.”

According to Inform's Satloff, the move that his company enables from manual to automated generation of 'see also'-type contextual links ensures a far richer and more dynamic experience for the reader. He estimates that editorial staff previously spent 12-15 minutes per story tagging and adding a small number of pointers to further material. His company's system now provides this almost instantaneously, and for free.

He stresses, too, that the tagging significantly increases reader engagement, causing them to spend more time on the site than they otherwise would, and leading them to historical pages that would otherwise rarely be seen.

The automatic generation of topic pages that amalgamate stories around a particular issue is successful in driving new traffic to news sites. A search for [New York] Mayor Bloomberg, for example, sees the New York Daily News' (another Inform customer) topic page appear at number five in the listings for me.

These topic pages are extremely visible, and are the key to monetising a deployment of Inform's technology via a revenue sharing deal on advertising income from these 'new' pages.

Underpinning Inform's offering is what Satloff claims to be

"the largest taxonomy for news and sport"

Context, he argues, is key. Turning to another customer, the Irish Independent, he illustrates this with a simple example.

In the story, 'Alonso gives Keane vote of confidence,' the hyperlinked words and phrases throughout the article have been automatically inserted by Inform. Due to the context of the story, the word 'Liverpool' links to the football (soccer) club of that name, rather than to the city, the building society, or any other prominent use of the word. None of these technologies are perfect, of course, but Satloff illustrated the importance of context by pointing to a recent Forbes story in which a lack of such context led to a cow (called Apple) being associated with the tech stalwart of the same name.

For Solomon back at the Washington Times, it seems, this is just the beginning. He talked enthusiastically of plans for the next phase of the Times’ evolution, creating opportunities for readers to submit video commentaries and engage in audio-visual dialogue with one another via the site. He’s also keen to increase the follow-up links to stories, offering readers ever-more opportunities to research the topics discussed, to help, or to get involved.