Intelligently tagging the content on a site can be done either by hand as the content is created, or with some kind of text analysis algorithm. But the former is inefficient and time-consuming, while the latter can be expensive. Jiglu, which launches an official beta today, plans to tackle tagging in two ways. First with a free, ad-supported widget, which aims to re-point site visitors to further internal content, thus lifting page views and ad-revenue. Secondly with a white-label/OEM service for bigger content providers which will be disruptive to the normally more expensive enterprise systems.
Jiglu was in the Demo pit at TechCrunch40 and attracted some interest at the time, but made no announcement then. Today it is going after news sites and blogs, which want to suggest extra, in-site material but have so far had to tag the content by hand. It is often forgotten that tagging is a largely manual game. So anything that can automate the process, creating dynamic links and tags, and taking readers deeper into other content, is welcome.
Available for use with any English language website, the Jiglu javascript widget sends out a call for Jiglu’s servers to break down posts into component parts and analyze how the content fits together. Once the relationships are established, Jiglu tags and links to the content. Jiglu is also capable of aggregating up to 10 blogs or websites, working out the connections between the content. The free widget will be supported by advertising - initially AdSense - against its search results. You can see the widget running on a blog here.
But more interestingly, Jiglu is also launching a white-label version for sites with over a million monthly page impressions that will be fee-based rather than free. This means all the results will have the Jiglu branding removed in favour of the site’s brand. CEO Nigel Cannings told me that content providers will also get a better understanding of how users are moving through their sites as the OEM version produces analytics.
This is potentially a bigger source of revenue for Jiglu than it’s ad-based widget, especially since enterprise-level systems to tag content are typically very expensive. If Jiglu can do as good as or even nearly as good a job as, say an Autonomy, but for a much more competitive price, then it become a properly disruptive service. Autonomy and other similar services require serious integration. Jiglu is just a line of Javascript. You do the math.
It’s therefore no surprise to learn that Jiglu is actually a re-named and re-launched enterprise service. Formerly known as Mailspaces, its tool to analyze email traffic became what Jiglu is today. Enterprise’s loss is the blogger’s gain.
The firm behind Jiglu is coming out of the UK but, says Cannings, is basically going to be running the bulk of its operation out of Silicon Valley. Funding has come from UK VCs, including Oxford Technology Partners.
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http://images.google.com/images?q=jigaloo
Total rip off on the name. By the way, I heard there is a new image recognition startup: pitzahuut.com
No relation.
Huh, don’t smart people get tagging done, by putting a little text box near content with a “tag this” button?
“disruptive”? You mean “competitive”? Also, monster spelling and grammar failure in this article.
It’s amazing the names enterpreneurs give to their creatures.
Personally I think it would be great if all my content were auto-tagged, Chris.
I’ve experimented with using Yahoo’s “okish” content analysis web service to do this for blog posts and it works OKish - better and more thorough than adding tags manually, although Y!’s kind of hit-and-miss with the keywords it produces sometimes.
Jiglu would do better as a Facebook app
The name is wild. You gotta give ‘em credit.
Jiglu? Is this supposed to imply some kinda porn site or something? Otherwise I have no idea what this is supposed to do, then again I do’nt need to. I’m Steve Ballmer, only what I think matters.
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Good problem to potentially solve, but a wretched name. Word of advice to web 2.0 entrepreneurs, branding requires branding, for search engines or otherwise. If you can’t get the .com that makes sense, brand the .net. A single word .com that you make up is stupid most of the time, obviously examples like Google and Yahoo are exceptions. Keyword here is “exceptions”.
Good luck - interesting opportunity.
Anyone have any examples of this thing in action?
Can’t even find any browsing their site, and they’re not using it on their own blog…
2004 called!
@ AW Try these sites:
http://loosewire.typepad.com/
http://www.income100.com
and of course:
http://mbites.com/
http://
@AW - We do use it. We have our own blogging and community platform with the technology embedded in it (http://jigluhood.com- It’s wat was originally MailSpaces as described by Mike in the article)
A few example sites are:
http://lockerbiecase.blogspot.com/
http://super-conductor.blogspot.com/
http://cgullworld.blogspot.com/
http://igniteseattle.com/
http://www.loosewireblog.com/
http://mbites.com/
@Fake Steve: Jiglu - Jigsaw and Glue. It becomes a little more obvious when you see the site
Mike, (Butcher) speaking for algorithmic extraction of the content’s grammatical components such as meaningful sentences, contextual and phrasal tags there is a player that has been around for quite long time (pretty much a year now), although in closed beta called NoyJoe.com, which is btw sort of social search engine and content tagging system. From what we’ve seen so far they are doing pretty good work in getting a grammatically correct content automatically clustered into meaningful sentences as well as word, phrasal and contextual tags. You can check it out for yourself over here: http://www.nosyjoe.com/about.php
Once I remember used NewsVine and discovered they are also using sort of automatic tagging system based on the content submitted, even though way simpler than NosyJoe’s one, but my point is I think Jiglu is by far not the first system dealing with intelligent tagging.
Has anyone found an example of a white-label implementation?
Their sub-par web design disappoints, but the functionality seems good for a free application — especially the ability to cross index multiple sites.
Loose Wire’s review of Jiglu at WSJ.com:
http://online.wsj.com/article/.....elcomeSkip
It’s an interesting area, when we re-build ZDNet last year, we introduced auto tagging using technology from UltraKnowledge.
Initially this was just on editorial content, see - http://news.zdnet.co.uk (the story tags are auto generated) but I believe this has now been rolled out to the user gen areas too although tags don’t appear to be on the blog section yet. It also powers the search results, related links and tag clouds on the site.
I haven’t been involved since I left in January but it’s not quite as straightforward as just being a “black box” ASP solution. We found that differing content types had to be treated slightly differently to get optimum results. Once it was tuned, we could just leave it to run but it did require some up-front effort to get it working.
That said, the benefits are obvious as it creates a level of consistency in tagging that simply can’t be achieved manually and it certainly looks like it’s an area where others will be joining the market