Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

At the Web 3.0 Conference here this week, panelists discussed some of the ways that online publishers can cut expenses without reducing quality. Consider the process efficiencies that semantic web technologies can enable, noted Christine Connors, global director of semantic technology solutions at Dow Jones, where content creators use the company's own semantic tools to surface and identify new bits of data, as well as entity- extraction tools to find new brands or other information.

"It makes them more efficient," Connors said. "It reduces time to market and for research."

At the same time, Dow Jones' semantic technologies also allow for a greater variety of delivery mechanisms, which leads to a reduction in development time in getting content to a greater number of customers in the format they prefer -- "not just the format you want to deliver to them in."

The semantic technology from Zemanta, where panel speaker Andraz Tori is CTO, improves time to market and quality, while authors actually are in the process of creating content, he told the audience. While bloggers are writing or researching a topic, it provides information on links to who else has written about it, for example, letting writers point and click their way to enriching content as they type, including suggesting tags they can use.

But, notes Tori, not only will your own costs cut down -- so will those of your competition. And as costs decrease, the doors open to new competitors, leaving Tori to conclude that a focus on cutting costs alone is something of a dead end.

"Because cost is reduced, there are so many more publishers today," he said, "and as the pie gets smaller, there's more than content to monetizing the brand." That said, the content that requires deep reporting and costs more to produce than, say, commodity posts on celebrity gossip, is going to emerge the breadwinner, because it will give publishers a stepping stone to creating other types of product the publishers can monetize.
In terms of driving costs down, Tori also suggested that online publishers look to ways that they might use semantic technologies to enhance collaborative efforts with your audience, learning from current models such as Wikipedia. That can raise questions over the provenance part of the semantic web -- what provider of information outside of your four walls will you trust, if anyone, to automatically publish anything.

Connors noted that semantic technologies also can be invaluable to the tasks of identifying what assets already exist, leaving them within their unique silos, but still making them available for others to search on -- a technique she employed in her previous position at Raytheon. The project, which involved dealing with masses of work in the company's digital library that had been published by Raytheon engineers and other employees, delivered $1 million in savings per year, she said.

When it comes to driving additional revenue, the opportunity is there to take advantage of the power of semantic technology to extract data from systems to understand what your audience is most interested in so that you can sell around that, and into industries that can gain value from making a relevant connection to your readers.

"If advertisers are happier with results and realizing higher ROI, they will spend more with you," Connors said.