We’ll be releasing version 4.1 of OpenCalais on Monday 15 June (and Release 4.2 about three weeks later!). This release has a number of new features – but for the moment we want to focus on making certain it is backwards compatible with your existing applications.

Beginning now, version 4.1 is exposed for compatibility testing at the API access point of http://beta.opencalais.com. Just point your application to this address, make sure everything works and then point back to the default http://api.opencalais.com.

Interesting news yesterday from Google. Basically they’ve announced that their new Rich Snippets feature will harvest semantic metadata from web pages using Microformats or RDFa.

Interesting news yesterday from Google. Basically they’ve announced that their new Rich Snippets feature will harvest semantic metadata from web pages using Microformats or RDFa.

Just a quick note to say we hope to see you at one of two key industry conferences this spring.  Here's what we're up to in May and June:

1.) The Web 3.0 conference takes place in New York City at the New Yorker Hotel on May 19 & 20, 2009.

We will be offering a media industry and publisher-centric presentation on day one of the show.  We look forward to catching up with everyone on the east coast, and hearing about the semantic and Linked Data projects folks have been working on over the past year.

Developers - we've posted information about the Resolved Entity Analyzer in the Showcase. It analyzes entities and outputs in an xml file containing simplified data gathered from OpenCalais and Linked Data.

Check it out here.

As you may have noticed we've had some intermittent stability and response time issues over the last few days. We believe we have the problem solved - or at least quarantined.

We have one particularily high volume user who submits a very wide range of content types to us. Due to some errors in the way they were using the API and some errors in the way we were handling errors (whew..) - we were seeing system utilizations that were off the chart.

We've moved that user to their own little quarantine island until we get things worked out with them. As soon as we did this - the remainder of our servers paused for a moment, took a deep breath, and then went back to almost idle - where they belong.