Thanks to Chet Ensign for forwarding a link to this story about newspapers linking to rival sites. This could easily apply to other online publishers as well.
The story describes how Inform's publisher services product uses topical metadata to create links to related online content. (Be sure to view the animated brochure at the bottom of the page.) If you're a publisher using the service, the Inform software finds topics in your site's content and creates inline links or sidebar link lists for you to include. It also provides premium services for things like search term disambiguation. Pretty cool technology, and pretty interesting business model for those publishers willing to set aside traditional concerns about linking to rival sites in exchange for the (to my mind) more important goal of satisfying their readers' desires for relevant information.
Inform also has a free news service that provides a great illustration of applied topical metadata, especially for general news publishers. Just go to their home page and click on the related topics links to get a glimpse inside their categorization scheme (topics, industries, people, places, companies [organizations], products). They also use standard news categories for their primary navigation, plus some additional subcategories that I'd guess map to their topical categories. Site users can customize their access to the news by subscribing to online sources, topics, and RSS feeds of their choice. Good stuff for the reader, but mostly a nice illustration to the publishers Inform wants to serve of the kinds of things they could do on their own sites.
Side note - Reading stories about Inform made me wonder about the complicated web of relationships forming among newspapers, AP, Google, and services like Inform. Definitely some overlapping territory here. And by searching for AP and Google on Inform's site, I found this story.
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