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8 February 2008
Reuters gets a very clever CEO
Posted by Paul Miller at February 8, 2008 08:57 PM
Tim O'Reilly provides an interesting insight into the thinking of Reuters' CEO-in-waiting, Devin Wenig. Tim's post rides on the back of an on-stage interview he conducted with Devin during O'Reilly's new Money:Tech conference which just wrapped up in New York.
In amongst a lot of insight, Tim writes,
“Devin's point about the semantic web was thought-provoking. Ultimately, Reuters' news is the raw material for analysis and application by investors and downstream news organizations. Adding metadata to make that job of analysis easier for those building additional value on top of your product is a really interesting way to view the publishing opportunity. If you don't think of what you produce as the 'final product' but rather as a step in an information pipeline, what do you do differently to add value for downstream consumers? In Reuters' case, Devin thinks you add hooks to make your information more programmable. This is a really important insight, and one I'm going to be chewing on for some time.”
“Really important insight” ? Too right!
Tim continues,
“That's a really good case for the Semantic Web, and one that I hadn't understood before. It's not about having end users add semantics for the love of it. That's just overhead, which is why I've always argued against it, preferring the kind of implicit semantics that come from applications that harness user self-interest. But professional publishers definitely have an incentive to add semantics if their ultimate consumer is not just reading what they produce, but processing it in increasingly sophisticated ways.”
It sounds as if Devin needs the sort of connection exploiting that the Talis Platform was built for. It also sounds as if he'd be a great addition to Nova Spivack, Brad Feld, Mills Davis, Troy Lane Williams, this week's extra-special mystery guest, and the rest in our ongoing Semantic Web podcast series.
Does anyone have his number?
Technorati Tags: Devin Wenig, Reuters, Semantic Web, Talis, Talis Platform, Tim O'Reilly, Web 3.0
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Comments
I'll tell him of your interest. Nice series.
Posted by: lewis at February 23, 2008 09:36 PM
