provided by: 
Originally published at Internet.com AdaptiveBlue today announced SmartLinks, which it bills as a way to bring the power of context and semantics to blogs and web sites.
Turning an ordinary link into a semantic link lets bloggers and web site operators bring the best of the web to the site, and it lets users get to the best information about this object quickly, says Alex Iskold, founder and CEO of the smart browser and personalization vendor.
SmartLinks are automatically inserted for links to pages about specific categories -books, music, movies, stocks, recipes, restaurants, gadgets, people, wine, and so on. The semantic angle is knowing the kind of object a person is linking to, so AdaptiveBlue can infer other links that make sense and then integrate all the related information in one place.
We are taking a link that is like an atom of the web and saying, What does it take to bring semantics to the link? says Iskold.
AdaptiveBlue has put together a vertical search engine specific to each category. For books, for example, it picked some 30 sites, but in some categories, it draws from hundreds of sites to help readers connect to relevant information from around the web. Iskold says AdaptiveBlue chooses web sites to include based on traffic rankings from sources such as Alexa, while it came up with its blog lists based on manual investigations. That includes finding which blogs in particular categories have been well reviewed in other publications, and which blogs those blogs themselves link to. Adding additional sites as new ones gain popularity can be quickly accomplished, Iskold says.
The first time someone anywhere on the web clicks on a SmartLink - say, to a book - AdaptiveBlue processes the underlying page or calls the web operators API, depending on what kind of URL it is. Iskold says this builds the groundwork for users elsewhere to leverage AdaptiveBlues having collected the semantics of the object and put it in its database. Think of the next steps that can come from knowing that on this page in Amazon there is a book called The Road and on Barnes & Noble there is another page with the same book, he says.
That becomes a powerful concept where you know you went to the book on Amazon and I went to Barnes & Noble - computers now dont know that we looked at the same book, but what if we connected that? Thats where you will see the next steps coming from us, Iskold says.
Smart Links integrate with AdaptiveBlues BlueOrganizer, letting users of that technology instantly save the books, music, or other information from Smart Links, and have them become available in the BlueOrganizer Sidebar where users organize and search items. At a high level we have a browsing technology and a publishing technology, so we are injecting semantics through consumers and their browsing experience and through publishers, says Iskold. You make the browser smart and augment pages with semantics, and once you connect them, you will have an integrated web effect. Thats what we are shooting for.
Iskold sees a big difference between the efforts of AdaptiveBlue and that of Freebase or Radar Networks, which just publicly demonstrated its Twine technology.
What I have argued and will argue with them in the future is that they are like silos and we are doing much more of a distributed approach, he says. Were trying to do whats actually useful, and then the semantics is not the end but the means to the end . Thats the whole difference in the approach.
Author: Jennifer Zaino
Read article at Internet.com site