Over the last two years, our portfolio company Adaptive Blue has become known for its ability to automatically recognize things like books, movies, stocks, and wines on the web. By using semantic analysis to figure out the difference between The Da Vinci Code, the book and The Da Vinci Code, the movie, they are able to provide useful shortcuts that accelerate the experience of surfing the web.
Last night, Adaptive Blue announced an initiative that compliments their top down approach with a drop dead simple bottom’s up approach that can be used by any publisher or blogger who wants to make their content more discoverable and more useful. AB Meta a simple and open format for annotating pages about things. AB Meta complements existing approaches like RDF and Microformats and is eRDF (a flavor of RDF) compliant. Because the format annotates the header and does not require any modification to the page, it is light weight. Because it is less ambitious and not as general as existing formats, it is simpler and more accessible to a blogger who may be familiar with HTML but has never written a line of code.
The Web is changing. It is no longer just a playground for the digerati. As more and more people use the Web every day for everyday things, its power and limitations are both becoming more obvious. Adaptive Blue developed AB Meta in the hopes that, by making annotation simpler and more accessible to the growing group of publishers and bloggers on the Web, it will make the Web more valuable to users.