In my previous post, I gave a hypothetical example of how OpenCalais — the web service offered by Thompson Reuters that automatically annotates semantic metadata for regular HTML pages — might incorporate a kind of semantic advertising. However, unless you’ve personally integrated OpenCalais into your site or blog, it might have been a bit hard to visualize what exactly that semantic metadata could be. Sounds very geeky and abstract, and might leave the marketer in …

Semantic data in your web site now Continue Reading »

Just read a fascinating article on ReadWriteWeb, Will the Semantic Web Have a Gender?, that perfectly illustrates the challenges of semantic branding. The article summarizes arguments made by Corinna Bath, a researcher who studies gender and technology, in a recent interview. She makes a case that the semantic web may develop a gender bias because the categories of relationships that are becoming standardized — e.g., the Dublin Core ontology — subconsciously reflect the worldview of …

Semantic branding and gender politics Continue Reading »

Earlier this week, Adweek published An Open Letter to the CEO of WPP that I wrote as a guest columnist. WPP is one of the top advertising holding companies in the world — up there with Omnicom, Publicis, and Interpublic. Its more well-known subsidiaries include Ogilvy, Young & Rubicam, and J. Walter Thompson. The reason for my letter was to dissuade WPP from fighting Google and Microsoft directly to get a piece of the current …

Marketer-technologists for agencies Continue Reading »

Chris Anderson’s theory of The Long Tail in Internet commerce and marketing has been one of the more influential concepts in online strategy and business models. Amazon, Google, eBay, iTunes, NetFlix — these are all major Long Tail success stories. I’d contend that many of the current best strategies in search engine optimization are essentially derived from Long Tail theory. These ideas will therefore be naturally extended into semantic marketing and SEO++ accordingly. Even MySpace, …

Debate on The Long Tail Continue Reading »