By: E&P Staff Joining other media clients, including Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive and Cox Newspapers, The Washington Times has engaged New York-based Inform Technologies to help it enhance the content and user experience at its redesigned WashingtonTimes.com.
Inform calls its technology a "journalistic" solution for media companies that intelligently mines and links content from sites, archives and the Web overall. The solution automatically creates links within content, as well as new, topic-specific Web pages. By making Web sites deeper and richer, it aims to encourage readers to spend more time and view more pages, giving media companies opportunities for additional revenue.
The Times relies on Inform to create topic-specific "theme" pages about significant news and newsmakers. Each theme page is automatically updated with relevant Washington Times stories and photographs, as well as articles, pictures, video and blog posts from Web sites chosen by Times editors. Each article includes a link to related themes (there are 400,000 potential themes, on topics ranging from John McCain to the Washington Redskins to video games.)
Like an extra team of editors, Inform uses the Semantic Web to search, organize and link millions of pages of content. Proprietary rules and algorithms identify topics and articles that are similar and relevant to each other. The technology then creates links between articles, as well as dynamic topic-specific pages that pull together articles, blogs, Web casts and videos on a given subject. Links and topic pages are automatically updated, as the software continuously learns how particular words - e.g., Barack Obama, energy policy -- are related to each other. The client decides how far the links will reach -- within a single site, to other company sites, or to editorially selected portions of the Web.
Inform's solution also drives The Washington Times' "Dig Deeper" feature -- a clickable, cube-shaped graphic that appears in the lead story and allows readers to find related themes and related stories. A "Dig Deeper" module in a June 26 story on the Supreme Court's D.C. handgun-ban decision calls up themes such as "Justice Antonin Scalia," "U.S. Court of Appeals" and stories on other recent High Court decisions. Inform's technology also links the Times' repository of video and multimedia content to articles throughout the site.
Washington Times Executive Editor John Solomon: "Our goal in this comprehensive Web site redesign was to use the full potential of the Web -- with its capacity for rich links and rich content - to give our readers extreme utility and a highly compelling experience. We want them to be able to explore a story in its full breadth and depth, and enjoy themselves while they do it. And we need to be able to maintain editorial quality and control. Inform's technology helps us do that: We can provide rich content automatically and cost-effectively, control the outside content that's linked to our site and keep our editors free to do what they do best -- shape our coverage and exercise high-level news judgment."
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