Microformats, OpenCalais, TextDigger...help!

2 replies
I'm so confused...LOL.

Here's the deal.

We have a 3000+ page website that gets around 33,000 uniques/month right now and we are always looking for additional ways to get RELEVANT traffic as much of it is monetized by advertising.

Unfortunately, when this site was first started it was before I had hooked up with someone who knew Joomla/PHP and other open source content management systems (we use Phil Taylor's JoomlaTags for the Joomla sites which works well).

We don't really want to go through the headache of converting the whole site over to a CMS. But we do want to somehow mark up these regular html pages with semantic tagging - ultimately that's what we're trying to do. But we're also just looking for a good place to start learning about the following (this is one of those situations where we don't know enough about what we're looking for to know exactly how to ask for it).

Anyhow...

Somehow I stumbled onto OpenCalais - which I noticed Google using on their site in at least some sections. If you're using Tagaroo for WordPress you likely already know what OpenCalais is (I had no idea until a few weeks ago).

If not, their own description is as follows:

"Calais is a web service that uses natural language processing (NLP) technology to semantically tag text that is input to the service. The tags are delivered to the user who can then incorporate them into other applications - for search, news aggregation, blogs, catalogs, you name it."

That almost makes sense to me. LOL. I GUESS it's saying that it would pull tags from a site to be fed through their transaction processor to be used by other applications via an OpenCalais API key.

And I GUESS an application like Tagaroo accesses OpenCalais through it's API and brings back suggested tags, photos, etc. based on the blog post content.

I haven't really wrapped my head around how and if TextDigger is significantly different in any way but it's another means to make the content more findable through use of relevant metadata.

All of this seems to be under the umbrella of "microformats" - but like I've mentioned we're so new to this that we just don't even know where to start and are just looking for some pointers...like "Microformats for Dummies". LOL.

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help us start on our quest of de-confusion.
#markup #microformats #opencalais #semantic #textdigger #textdiggerhelp
  • Profile picture of the author zerofill
    opencalais tags data with data...that is what the microformats injection blah blah is...lol

    Opencalais does this for search engines...It's used to make your page more relevant in the eyes of search engines that use it...or more specific...

    However I think so far it only does a lot for yahoo's crawler at the moment...

    I have been playing with marmoset for open calais for some time now.

    Think of it as like an mp3 player...You see the data about the song that is playing..."data about data" when you look at the artist, title, etc...

    When your page is requested by a search engine...and you have a page about Barack Obama...it may tag in data like "next president, born in blah blah"

    Or your page is about
    John Doe...and there are several John Doe out there...but you are specifically talking about the one that created the cure for the cold...

    If you play around with marmoset from their tools section...you can see what a crawler would see by adding a switch to the url of your site...You can then see it as a person would or as a crawler. You have to view the source to see what it changes or injects. It will not be visible on the page itself.
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    • Profile picture of the author psresearch
      Originally Posted by zerofill View Post

      Or your page is about
      John Doe...and there are several John Doe out there...but you are specifically talking about the one that created the cure for the cold...

      If you play around with marmoset from their tools section...you can see what a crawler would see by adding a switch to the url of your site...You can then see it as a person would or as a crawler. You have to view the source to see what it changes or injects. It will not be visible on the page itself.
      Terrific. Thanks. We'll find marmoset and play around with it.

      This sounds like it could be pretty useful.
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