Jiglu: Smarter (?) Contextual Tagging
SaaS, Startups October 15th, 2007
Since I’ve just advocated context, context and context fro social networking, I figure I might as well try Jiglu, being launched today, which promises to auto-tag our blogs in context.
Blognation & CenterNetworks both warmly praise the new service, and Venturebeat provides detailed analysis:
Jiglu, by comparison, uses semantic search technology to take tagging a step further, crawling entire websites to tag and categorize according to the relative importance of subjects.
The technology works by first determining important keywords within specific blocks of text, then drawing correlations between keywords in other blocks, assigning scores to keywords or phrases that come up repeatedly to produce a list of important tags. The software works continuously, adjusting its scoring system when new content is introduced…
What I am missing from all these writeups is actual demonstration of Jiglu. Guys, I don’t see your Jiglu widget installed…
OK, so I’ll be the guinea-pig: it’s installed right here on the sidebar(*), let’s wait and see the results it will soon (?) produce.
Update: further analysis of Jiglu’s business model on TechCrunch.
*Update #2: For now I removed the widget, but only temporarily. It grew a mile long, making it hard to read (too low level of granularity?). CEO Nigel (see comments below) says to check in a few days, so that’s what I’ll do.
Tags: contextual tagging, jiglu, smart tagging, tagging, tags
Zoli Erdos
I think VentureBeat has enough spacing issues to make a widget a bit excessive. The option to link to past content in a post’s text is interesting, though, and could save bloggers a significant amount of work. Let me know how it goes
Chris,
Thanks for your comment. You lost me with the “link to past content” part.
Are you talking about some Jiglu feature I missed, or me quoting your post? If the latter, well I tend to write my own stuff, like this, but this was one of those quickies, i.e. “these guys all wrote about it, but no-one shows it in action, so I’ll do it”. I simply pointed to the best writeup, and it’s yours, and I linked back to you…
Or is is just my pre-coffee moment?
Thanks for installing the widget, Zoli. It’s spidering at the moment, and I hope you like the results. We don’t promise perfection, and never will, although we’re constantly looking at ways to improve the tags and the user experience.
There’s a lot of configuration you can do with the widget, including changing the colors, adding and deleting tags manually, and deciding what type of tags and links should appear. You can even add more blogs to be aggregated with this if you want to cross-tag and cross-link
And in the meantime, while the spider’s doing its stuff, a few other examples of where it’s in use:
http://igniteseattle.com/
http://www.loosewireblog.com/
http://mbites.com/
Naturally, I’d love to see it running on VentureBeat! However, we were just pleased to see the article. Thanks Chris.
you can see jiglu here:
http://loosewire.typepad.com/blog/
and here:
http://mbites.com
Zoli I agree with your observation about not seeing the widget in action. I look forward to seeing how it shows on your site after its done the analysis.
Zoli: A pre-coffee moment, but I understand entirely. Anything before noon is early. You’re more than welcome to quote us as you did.
Jiglu can insert links in the actual text of a post. For example, if I write about green teaa lot and reference it in a particular post, Jiglu will begin turning the first reference to green tea into a link back to my past posts that mention it.
That’s optional, but I’m pretty sure it’s an active option — you should be able to give it a shot if you want.
That sounds really interesting – as long as the author retains control:-)
Now, if only I could figure out why your comments always get in the moderation queue …
Nigel, I’m already seeing a slow-down: the Jiglu widget holds up the rest of the sidebar, too:-(
I’m surprised, as it’s designed to be small, and to load last, and it’s not an issue we’ve had elsewhere. sometimes it appears to take time because it’s loading behind something else
When it’s finished its spider, if it’s still apparently slow, I’ll ask the development team to look, because it should not cause that issue
Nigel,
I’ve read somewhere (perhaps on Fred Wilson’s blog?) that there was a technique whereby scripts don’t hold the rest of the blog from loading when they slow down…
Ouch, Nigel, I’m starting to see a lot of dotted lines under words Jiglu determined as tags. This makes the original posts hard to read, is there a configuration step to disable it?
Thanks.
No problem – Log back in to jiglu.com, and follow the “Change how the widgets look link”
Then unselect “Put links in the text” and save
sorted!
Much better, thanks… and also thanks for the fast response:-)
Re: Update 2
If you don’t have the hyperlinks setting on (which marks up the text to show the links to other content), then the widget displays in full (usually it shrinks if you have more than 20 items displaying).
If you have a lot of tags, this can use up a lot of room.
We’re looking at a number of options concerning widget folding at the moment, and we’ll post something as soon as we have an update.
http://blog.jiglu.com/knowledge/+atom and http://support.jiglu.com/tags/topics/tagging-faq+atom are the two feeds we use for announcements.
Thanks again for giving us a go
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Nigel, I played with it again, but will have to remove it until you come up with a fix. The issues I see for now:
Thanks, and I hope to be able to try it again.
Hi Zoli
1. Number of tags is very dependent on the content of the blog. If we’ve tagged it, it means that there is other relavant stuff in your blog.
We have the ability to change the way we produce tags dynamically, and will in time provide some settings that users can use to do this themselves.. You can also.
2. we’re looking at the best way to balance this at the moment. fix next week
3. We deliberately use the dotted underline to show that it’s NOT and editorially generated link. we want to reader to be able to differentiate. that said, the point is well made, and I’ll feed it back round the development loop. we have a vast amount of things we’re putting into the product, and it’s a timing issue!
thanks again for giving it a go
And we’re back…
“Folding” no longer dependent on having the inline links turned on
Over to you!
Nigel, great, in two ways:
- I really think this is a lot better, as you can see your widget is back now:-)
- It shows you guys listen and act fast!
But I am still seeing the delay we discussed above.
It would be OK for the Jiglu widget to take a little time, if only it wouldn’t hold the rest of the sidebar content from loading.
I will ask the developers to look, but certainly loading a dozen or so pages at the moment, I’m not seeing any delay at all, and I’m not much closer to the servers that you are… Maybe a temporary network bottleneck?
PS, the fold threshold is set at 10 items. You can reduce or increase that as you want
I just had to switch it off, after experiencing long delays. Like I said before, it would be (almost) OK for Jiglu to sometimes load slowly, but when it holds most of my sidebar content from loading, I have no choice but remove it.