Wikicompany

Marketing 0.5

April 22, 2006 on 10:12 pm | In wikicompany, marketing, business, semanticweb | No Comments

The semantical tag interface is improving, see eg. the list of companies active in germany.

In other news: Today I received a free Google Adwords coupon for 50 Euro. It will be interesting to play with this subtle, but well designed, ad campaign tool. Perhaps it will even benefit the project in some way.

I made some Wikicompany marketing material for the occasion. Click on the globe to promote your business via Wikicompany.

Semantic tagging coming along

April 17, 2006 on 4:08 pm | In semweb, wikicompany, semanticweb, usability, tagging, rss | No Comments

Part of the transition from categories to semantic tags is now done on Wikicompany.

See the tags on these examples: Full Sail Brewing, VNU, Atos Origin

The tag browsing interface is still primitive, but because of the REST web service, a RSS feed with detailed info is available for each company, so many more details can be presented (logo, other tags, phone numbers, subsidiaries, etc).

Even mediawiki extensions can be used within the tag interface, as can be seen in the examples. This really shows the power of a good wiki platform, instead of a traditional CMS.

Semantic tagging todo's:

• A commandline tool to extract the semantic relations from every article and dump these into the SMW tables.
• The new company input form should register semantic annotations automatically.
• A more usable interface for browsing tags, with dynamic filters
  • Better usability when searching and browsing tag-sets. Something like the ShopWiki page styles seems nice.
  • Move to REST URLs and services for the tag browse interface
  • Uniform multi-word tag input / output (not often needed, but still important)
  • A "related tags" function (based on the graph analyis of tags)
  • Flickr and delicious tag integration ("show the 5 most interesting pictures and links belonging to this set of tags"). Open web services are simply delicious.
  • Google maps rendering of companies per tag-set? I'm actually thinking to redo some of the geo interfaces on Wikicompany. Eg. provide a full-screen browse interface, in addition to the normal gmap view.

Another project I'm working on is a web crawler for creating company profiles from just a URL. Not an easy task, but very interesting work. Since the amount of user contributions is currently very low, this may provide a way to get many more free company profiles.

Wikicompany outage

April 3, 2006 on 1:08 am | In Uncategorized | No Comments

Wikicompany.org and debianlinux.net were unreachable, during most of this weekend, due to intermittent server power-supply problems at the co-location in Amsterdam, causing the Wikicompany MySQL DB to crash and become corrupt. These problems should be gone now, hopefully.

In case you think this outage was my lousy April 1st contribution, look here: Consumer, Inc.

- Jama Poulsen

Consumer, Inc.

April 1, 2006 on 3:56 am | In wikicompany, business, aprilfoolsday | No Comments

Featured company

Consumer, Inc. (Euronext: CONS) is a leading player in the world of marketing and advertising, and has operations all over the world. The name gets its origin from an organism which ingests other organisms or food particles.

Consumer ranks 2nd in Europe and 3rd in the world based on tier 1 capital, with on average USD 200 in debt, in more than 280 countries, a staff of about 0.3 full-time equivalents and total assets of USD -0.0021 billion.

In the US Consumer operates under the name Buyers. Their current slogan is Merry Christmas.

News

• US consumer spending rises 0.1 percent in February - People's Daily Online
• Drop in consumer confidence found - Financial Times
• Orchestrating Your Consumer-Directed Health Plan - Forbes
• TSMC: Consumer market, 90-nm driving foundry sales - EETimes.com
• Consumer Electronics Ownership Up, Says CEA - TMCnet
• US consumer sentiment up in March - Monsters and Critics.com
• 2006 Consumer Broadband Survey of 1,200 US Households Showing the … - TMCnet
• US consumer spending rises 0.1% in Feb. - MarketWatch
• Italy household goods consumer finance sector making losses - CR … - Forbes
• Dr Behl is member of consumer disputes redressal forum - Chandigarh Newsline