Photo courtesy: Flickr/isabel*la

Being a blogger has its joys – A platform for your opinions! A following! Stardom!(OK, let’s not get carried away…) But blogging has its travails, as well, such as the need always to be generating content to keep your audience coming back to your site. That can wreak havoc with the important things in life, like sleeping.

What help is there for the individuals we might affectionately call the ‘lazy bloggers’? (Intermittently lazy, of course.) Evri Director of Engineering Michael “Misha” Bolotski recently talked to Semantic Web about the semantic web service vendor’s plans to help these folks. The idea is to put into play more elements of its technology, such as its notion of collections that lets users follow entities around topics they’re interested in, so that bloggers can become better curators for their sites. They then get better, that is, at pinpointing streams around their specialty and letting information about that flow to their base.

It’s kind of content aggregation for the blogging masses, those individual flame-keepers who want to keep their site fresh without having to constantly publish fresh and original content. (See Semantic Web blog’s meditation on curation for the publishing industry at large here, and Primal’s thoughts around content manufacturing here.

“Writing stuff is hard. People who start blogs get excited and then they realize they have a life outside of that, and blogging is actually dropping off,” Bolotski says. Bolotski points to his own wife’s experience keeping a mommy blog as an example of how Evri’s increasing focus on content curation could be put to use by the millions of regular-Joe bloggers out there who find themselves in these straits. “She lost readers when she dropped to publishing three times a week, but when our technology gets exposed she can say I care about these other mommy blogs, I care about keywords for things such as product recalls, and these toy manufacturers and this review site. And when our NLP on articles discovers a Graco recall or anything like that, put that in the stream,” he says. “Now you have a curated stream that involves zero interactions from the blogger.”

The lazy blogging value, he says, “is knowing what the right queries are but not having to come back day after day and write to maintain a readership.” And of course the revenue that ideally follows from that. Of course, a blogger’s personal brand is his or her market value, so this can’t be a replacement for original content creation. So curated content on its own won’t stand but will need to be an accessory to long-form content, and also get a boost from things such as overlaying editorial opinion on top of it – still a bit less work than the complete do-it-yourself model. “The notion of a stream is that it lets u choose the granularity, the frequency, and how much curation you want to do,” Bolotski says.

Bolotski says Evri will be ramping up its collections capabilities, which haven’t been well exposed on the site, with roadmaps in place for enabling a better curation experience through improved ability to leverage keywords, relationships and faceted search queries. “We have tens of thousands of facets--musicians, actors, baseball players, so now it’s about how to build a meaningful search interface just within the facets,” he says as an example. “We don’t want to unleash the wrong interface model, so we’re taking four or five people inside the company who are passionate about topic areas and making them the guinea pigs for this.”

Part and parcel of catering to lazy bloggers’ specific interests and audiences are where Evri’s acquisition of Radar Network’s technology will help, he says. “Essentially you need to be able to build ontologies on the fly,” he says, to account for categorizations that haven’t been built. “So we have to enable people to set up their own way of organizing information as they like to think about it,” Bolotski says.

Also a future possibility for the lazy blogger: Taking advantage of Evri’s giant taxonomy of relationships and its work on its relationship API to essentially build faceted search atop sentiment. For instance, bloggers focused on the sports space could draw from online articles to build insight into what particular athletes like or don’t like -- using Evri’s semantic technology it can disambiguate, for example, that Will Smith is an athlete because he is a football player without the article specifying that he is an athletic figure. “So you can ask very informed sentiment questions,” Bolotski says. And report those findings to your audience – whether it’s x percent of athletes say they like a particular piece of equipment or x percent of politicians say they appreciate the work of a particular environmental organization.

“That piece of information is interesting to your reader and another factor driving people to your site,” he says, “and once you set up things it keeps going. There’s no manual compiling – the curator can just figure out how he wants to slice and dice things.”