Feature
The Structured Web
What we're talking about here is all the stuff that's out there on the Internet. Most people are happy to use their browser to display Web pages and send messages and images with their Web-based email and IM systems. Web site data can be organized by browsers to accomplish these tasks. That's why they are so great. They can take numbers and text and display them properly on our laptops, smartphones and tablets so we can understand what they mean. However, the online world is still a disorganized place, and technologists are now focusing more on organizing virtual data into even more useful ways.
The exploding amount of online data, brought on by increasing numbers of Internet and smartphone users, has made it more important than ever to structure data that can be linked more efficiently across the Web. Using metadata, Web page information can be made easier to search, index and repackage for uses other than displaying in a Web browser. This embedded information on Web sites can help databases and search engines find things faster, and make them more useful to us. Startup Diffbot is one company that is taking this approach in a pretty unusual way.
Diffbot is less than a year old, and as it grows, more types of Web pages will be readable.
Learning Opportunities
Webinar
Jun
13
The Future of Contact Centers with AI at the Helm
Learn how to balance human intuition and interaction with the potential uses of AI to create delightful and lasting CX
Webinar
Jun
13
Learn How to Deliver Dynamic Video Experiences at Scale
Learn how to convert existing assets into video experiences in near real-time.
Webinar
Jun
20
3 Steps to Unlock Your Customer Data and Drive Revenue
Discover how Twilio Segment’s #1 Customer Data Platform helps implement data-driven strategies.
Webinar
Jun
21
Retail Reinvented: A Masterclass in Creating Digital Experiences That Click
Hear how online retailers architect their digital experience infrastructure for peak traffic and demand
Webinar
Jun
21
The Feedback Loop: Accelerating Personalization for Exemplary Customer Experiences
Are you ready to harness the power of feedback in your personalization strategy?
Webinar
Jun
22
How to Succeed in Today's Engagement Economy
Doing true personalization at scale with marketing automation
Webinar
Jun
13
The Future of Contact Centers with AI at the Helm
Learn how to balance human intuition and interaction with the potential uses of AI to create delightful and lasting CX
Webinar
Jun
13
Learn How to Deliver Dynamic Video Experiences at Scale
Learn how to convert existing assets into video experiences in near real-time.
Diffbot for Machine Readable Content
Diffbot has created a system that can read the contents of a Web page and break it into component parts such as text, image and headline. It uses machine learning and natural language processing (not unlike Apple's Siri voice recognition) to do this, but so far, only for home pages and article pages. The company has determined there are at least 18 types of Web pages out there, and it will be working on making them readable as the company grows.
Once Diffbot breaks those pages into their component parts, the content can be repackaged into a magazine style layout for the iPad, for example. In fact, this is exactly what AOL is using Diffbot for with its Editions by AOL iPad app.
Without Diffbot, that content would have to be ported over from the existing CMS, a much slower process. Businesses that have a large amount of content they want to aggregate would benefit the most from this system. It's actually free if you're only doing 10,000 API calls per month, and Diffbot scales for enterprise users. Let us know in the comments if you've ever had to do a ton of content aggregation and would have loved to have Diffbot around to help you.
