More recently, services like Docstoc have opened up a new dimension — Document Space. Documents are content that is organized, packaged and presentable. Content tends to be scattered, documents are organized. Music tablature, time tables, cheat sheets, slideshows, etc. are much easier to consume when packaged as documents.

Docstoc maintains a database of more than 1.5M documents, with strict controls on quality and legality. MashLogic has placed the content, audio, and video you care about at your fingertips. Now we’re pleased to join forces and bring you one-click access to high-quality documents, from any web page (Press Release).

What Space will we explore next? Stay tuned.

In the meanwhile, we’re moving forward with our distribution strategy. We’ve built a framework that lets us rapidly create custom extensions for content publishers. These publishers can benefit from free, targeted traffic, directly from web pages. Meanwhile, users are always just one click away from their preferred sources of information.

We are pleased as crunch to announce the MashLogic Edition for TechCrunch!

From anywhere on the web, you can look up people and companies on CrunchBase, or link directly to related articles on the TechCrunch network of blogs.

This is the first of many such announcements we hope to bring to you in the coming weeks and months. If you publish content on the web, please contact us at feedback at mashlogic dot com to see how we can send you motivated readership from all over the web.

• recognizing interesting nouns (e.g. global warming, Pink Floyd),
• deciding what verbs are applicable (e.g. define ‘global warming’, listen to ‘Pink Floyd’, ), and,
• organizing the results into a relevant and digestible summary

I’ve been meaning to write about various Use Cases for MashLogic and this gives me a good lead-in to ramble about how MashLogic can serve as an educational tool.

Education is Learning punctuated by Discovery. Learning provides the factual foundation; Discovery adds color and depth.

The English Vocabulary mash shows definitions for uncommon words. This mash was originally suggested by non-native English speakers, and by high school students preparing for the SAT. The Learning bit is easy enough - mouse over the MashLogic link to see the definition. We achieve this without disrupting the flow of content, with minimal attention shift. By preserving the context, retention is enhanced. Compared with the traditional flow of opening a new window and typing at a search engine, our approach makes for more seamless and effective learning.

The dotted blue links added by MashLogic also provide subtle visual cues that enhance exploration and discovery. The philodox administered a recumbentibus to the skybald. See what I mean? [ed: the previous bit may not come through if you are reading this through an RSS feed]

In a similar vein, the Wikipedia mash shows a summary, often accompanied by an image, for terms that correspond to Wikipedia topics. Learn about topics as you consume content and Discover more by letting your eyes wander over the landscape of the web page.

Activate the Recent Headlines mash to dig deeper into alternate sources of information. You can select categories that educate (e.g. Science, Health) and those that inform (News, Business) or personalize the  mash with your own feeds.

Take Back the Web

It’s a snappy slogan, perhaps a bit bold. But for us, it’s a Business Imperative. We want to give you control over what gets linked, where those links take you, and how you interact with those links. For example:

• Control the hover vs. click behavior of the callouts (popups) through the Configuration -> Options panel.
• Suspend/Restart MashLogic by clicking the swirly icon in your browser toolbar.
• Drag the mashes up or down the stack to specify their precedence. Prefer TechCrunch information over Wikipedia? Just drag the TechCrunch mash up a few notches.

Bad MashLogic, No Donut

There seems to be a perception in some quarters that we remove or modify links and content, and it’s just a matter of time before you are sucked into a hellish vortex of spam and ads.

Dear me.

Our investor David Cowan has stated our position eloquently and explicitly. Please take a look.

While we undoubtedly make some boneheaded choices of terms to link, we will not touch the original links unless you instruct us to take action. And when you do ask, we pop up a little warning. Under default conditions all original links are available. We may add those dotted blue links under them, but all you have to do is click (as you always have) and you’ll get to the destination specified by the publisher. There is a nuance — if you have configured MashLogic with Show pop-up on mouse click selected, the original link will appear at the top of the callout.

Please feel free to direct comments to feedback at mashlogic dot com. We’re also tuned in to your tweets @mashlogic on Twitter.

Could we please have that donut now?

We’re now ready to see if MashLogic can chart the tempestuous Ocean of Real Users!

Our home page states our mission. Hyperlinks define relationships on the web. With the advent of self-serving techniques like internal links, SEO, and link farms, content publishers have diluted the utility of hyperlinks. We intend to liberate the link from their clutches and let you take back the web! Some refer to this as Benevolent Hyperlinking, but we’re not quite ready to print up the T-Shirts.

Our Firefox extension scans web pages and adds links to interesting Things. You tell us the kinds of Things you care about (e.g. baseball players) and we’ll find them on a page and link them to authoritative sources (e.g. MLB). We’ll link conceptual Things to Wikipedia (and show you a summary definition in a little pop-up), people Things (you know what I mean) to their LinkedIn profiles, company Things to CrunchBase, let you stream music by Artist Things, and a whole lot more.

See the dotted blue links on this blog (on Firefox & Flock)? These were auto-generated by MashLogic. Our extension does this for every page you visit. Personalize, Engage, and Discover!

We are currently sending invitations to interested users. This helps us manage growth and get a handle on issues of scaling and performance under Real World conditions. Please sign up on our website for invitations. Comments are welcome.

I’ve been asked whether MashLogic is a “Semantic Web company”, and my response varies based on who’s asking. I’ll clarify that here.

The Semantic Web is an enabling technology that improves the matching of intent between Consumers and Providers. That makes it something like DNS - end-users are generally unaware of its existence. Hence, I would be hesitant to pitch MashLogic as a Semantic Web company to users and publishers - have you heard of any DNS companies? So here’s what I tell them… “MashLogic is building a service that dynamically enriches web content to adapt to your preferences. We do this by using semantic intelligence (and when available, semantic markup) to uncover relationships between objects on a web page (e.g. names of people) and resources that service those objects (e.g. LinkedIn)“. Not as snappy as I’d like, but it’s the thought that counts.

Now we do use some traditional techniques (e.g. Classification, Extraction, Machine Learning, etc.) to accomplish our semantic goals. To investors and employees, I pitch MashLogic as a company that will help realize the promise of the Semantic Web. Not quite a Semantic Web company, but close enough.

Are we a Web 2.0 company? I don’t mind saying that we are, since we let users “mash up” data from sources of their choosing, we leverage and offer REST APIs, and our UI has the obligatory AJAX calls, progress meters and rounded corners. Detractors will accurately point out that our company name is not vowel-deprived.

Web 3.0? Wikipedia notes “More often (the term Web 3.0) is used as a marketing ploy to hype incremental improvements“. Count me in!

Social Graph? So I’ve been hearing about the Social Graph, which appears to describe a person-centric view of the web, including the social networks they inhabit, their online activities, their blogs and bookmarks, etc. Nova Spivack defines a Semantic Social Graph as a standardized (RDF, OWL) representation of a “regular” Social Graph. I have no idea how MashLogic plays into this, so we’ll just watch from the sidelines for now.

Giant Global Graph? What’s this? Tim Berners-Lee just wrote about GGG, and best I can tell, this is a generalizaton that does away with the person-centricity of the Social Graph and the document-centricity of the WWW. He says “It’s not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important“. Interestingly, we do care quite deeply about Things (capital T) at MashLogic. We look at web pages as implicit representations of Things and their Attributes. Our mashups are simply a way to put Things on Top of Other Things. The GGG is closer to our heart than Social Graphs.
 

At MashLogic we intend to use a variety of techniques to extract concepts and meaning from web content. Such content is semi-structured (pockets of unstructured text blocks within a structure of headings, paragraphs, links, and the like). Our approach is opportunistic in the sense that we will take formal meta-data if we find it, use feeds and APIs when they are available, or apply simple ontologies and rules and see where that takes us.

Getting to the topic of this post… regardless of whether applications match keywords, or apply sophisticated semantic analysis techniques to tease out meaning from content, the overarching goal is generally one of Matching Intent between Consumers and Providers. Content providers use page structure, meta tags, microformats, and markup to give visibility and access to their inventory of information, services, and products. These days most content providers are catering to two constituencies - search engines (and their sinister proxy, SEO) and consumers. On the other side, consumers explicitly express their Intent with keywords and preferences. Providers often combine this with implicit data from clickstreams, demographics, etc.

Information Retrieval implies a paradigm where the Consumer judiciously charts his course through an ocean of information and is ultimately responsible for ensuring that the retrieved information meets his needs. I’d like to think that we are approaching a time of Intent Reconciliation where Providers and Consumers co-operate in helping each other consummate their Intent. They do this by reducing the Ambiguity Gap between Intent and Information with Semantics. From that perspective, Semantics codifies Intent.

Our mission is to empower users and communities to customize and personalize web navigation. We are creating an “Adaptive Web” platform that gives you immediate and ubiquitous access to information and services that you prefer and trust. Keywords: AJAX, Semantic Intelligence, Mashups

Now that is admittedly pretty vague, but we intend to reveal additional details as we get closer to launch. We’ll use this blog to stay in touch.

Thanks for visiting.