With continuing investment in (and acquisition of) companies for whom semantic technologies are a key part of their proposition, we explore the extent to which investors are interested in ’semantic technology’ per se, and look at recent investments from Union Square Ventures to illustrate the wider discussion. A number of entrants to this year’s TechCrunch 50 event feature a semantic technology focus, and we also look at these with the help of Union Square’s Brad Burnham, TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld, and VentureBeat’s Chris Morrison.

I found the conversation really interesting … hope you enjoy it!

Thanks to Aaron, Alex and Chris for participating!

On this episode of ReadWriteTalk, I sit down with Daniela Barbosa from Dow Jones. Daniela is a social media maven and beyond her role at Dow Jones is a very active leader in the Data Portability Group. The majority of the interview focuses on a new eBook that she has released focused on how enterprises can adopt a blended taxonomy and folksonomies approach for managing their information. We do touch on Data Portability in the last question.

Links

• Upcoming Events Daniela is Participating In
• Daniela’s Blog
• Download Daniela’s eBook

(more…)

Gang regular Alex Iskold was unavailable for this call. Standing in for regular chair Paul Miller was gang member Tom Heath.

We’ve changed the format a bit for RWW Live.  Each week we’ll invite a special guest or two and have a discussion on a specific theme. We’re hoping that as it’s a live show, readers will be able to contribute questions via chat (we use TalkShoe) in real-time.

For the first such show, the topic is ‘The Future of Blogging’, based on a must-read post that Sarah Perez wrote last week and one Richard wrote a couple of weeks back.

We have two special guests this week. One is Aaron Brazelle of the excellent Technosailor blog. Aaron is the lead editor of Technosailor.com and a social media expert. He served as Director of Technology at b5media from 2005-2008 and is currently an independent consultant. Our other special guest is Muhammed Saleem, an occasional contributor to RWW, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.

The two engines are an interesting example of two different approaches popular in vertical search today - human powered vs. algorithmic or as Charles put it “man versus machine”.  Hope you enjoy this episode of ASE Live!

With so much effort being devoted to the back-office manipulation and storage of semantic data, it is all too easy to forget the opportunities - and challenges - posed in inviting mainstream users to ‘browse the graph’ of semantic data. With expert contributions from MIT’s David Karger and the DBpedia team’s Christian Becker, the Gang sets about ensuring that the Interface is not forgotten.

Gang regular Daniel Lewis was unavailable for this call, and OpenLink’s Ted Thibodeau participated on his behalf.

The call also closes with discussion of news from Hakia, which had just announced the imminent availability of a new API.  Gang regular Tom Heath was unavailable for this call, and Talis CTO Ian Davis participated on his behalf.