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.

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.