Because usage and registration for OpenCalais is very open (all we really require is a name and an email address) – it’s basically impossible for us to know who’s actually using the service. We know there are many thousands of you out there sending us many millions of documents per day – but we’re a bit in the dark about who the vast majority of you actually are.

Is OpenCalais Dead?

That was the title of a recent inquiry in our forums and a blog post by a potential user. It’s one of those catchy questions that can develop a life of it’s own - so let’s address it.

Here’s the executive summary: No. It isn’t dead. It’s alive and well and isn’t going away.

Now, a few more details. The OpenCalais team has always been open and transparent about what we’re up to - and we’ll continue that in this note.

OpenCalais has been in the news a fair amount of late, and I wanted to round up the clips for easy review here.

BIG NEWS!

The Nation Magazine, the US's oldest weekly magazine, has relaunched on the state-of-the-art OpenPublish platform from Phase2 Technologies, a Drupal distribution with OpenCalais baked-in.

The Nation Magazine’s redesign is the culmination of an 18-month effort to position the country’s oldest weekly magazine as a thought leader online.

The redesign features strategic product innovations like search-engine friendly “topic pages,” story-level Twitter feeds and instantly customizable homepage and section designs.

Introduction to OpenCalais

The free OpenCalais service and open API is the fastest way to tag the people, places, facts and events in your content.  It can help you improve your SEO, increase your reader engagement, create search-engine-friendly ‘topic hubs’ and streamline content operations – saving you time and money.

OpenCalais is free to use in both commercial and non-commercial settings, but can only be used on public content (don’t run your confidential or competitive company information through it!). OpenCalais does not keep a copy of your content, but it does keep a copy of the metadata it extracts there from.

As you may know, OpenCalais is a strategic initiative from Thomson Reuters, which is an industry leader in providing timely, accurate information to financial professionals.

Why OpenCalais?

Over the last few months you’ve probably seen a number of announcements about how OpenCalais has been chosen by one organization or another to support its business.

In a number of recent meetings I’ve been asked the (very fair) question, Why OpenCalais and not one of the other entity extraction services out there?

Given that the question seems to be coming up more often as the number of extraction services increases, I thought I’d get my best understanding of why many major players we’ve announced (and an equal number we haven’t) have chosen to go with OpenCalais. And – at the end – I’ll mention a few reasons why others haven’t chosen OpenCalais.

We are happy to report that we have resolved the bug that we identified in the initial 4.3 release, and that the new and improved OpenCalais 4.3 is up and running on all servers.
 
As a quick reminder, here are the new features and expanded capabilitites of the OpenCalais service.  As always, please let us know if you run into any issues or have any questions.
 
New in OpenCalais 4.3
 
Improved ‘Social Tags’: We are expanding on our popular Social Tags categorization technique by adding more generalized, aggregate tags.
 

We released OpenCalais 4.3 a day or so ago - and we’ve run into a few issues as we’ve rolled it out into production. We think we have a handle on the fixes needed – but to play it safe we’re going to roll back to Release 4.2 for at least the weekend.
 
Sorry for any inconvenience – but we’d rather play it safe and take a day or two to get things totally in shape.
 
Tom

Big News!

To kick-start 2010, we have updated virtually every tool we have in the OpenCalais arsenal. Check them out and let us know your thoughts.