First - thanks for taking the time and effort to write a thoughtful piece. It’s always refreshing to see something that goes beyond the “Look! A cool thing.. here’s the link)”.

We agree that there’s an enormous opportunity space for using visualization / innovative interaction metaphors powered by semantics to improve the news consumption experience. What we see as a big part of the challenge is selecting the right metaphors from the enormous library of innovative visualization approaches that will “click” with the end users. We’ve all been guilty at some point of using tools that are overly sophisticated or non-intuitive.

Slate has taken a step in the right direction by not trying to do too much. One day’s news, source material on the right, limited functionality. It’s a first step - but it’s a good step in the right direction of simplicity. As a next step I’d like to see it simplified even further and put right next to the article so I can see what’s connected to what I’m reading - rather than the entire universe of connections.

This tool - and others like it - also serve another purpose you touched on in your article: serving the needs of the Journalist. If you move beyond simple “tags” and use the full power of OpenCalais you have the opportunity to enable more effective and timely enterprise and investigative journalism as well.

A simple example: Take FOIA documents about government contract awards in a region. Run them through OpenCalais and create a graph of contract awards, people and companies. Step two - take the births, weddings, death and news from local papers. Extract family relationships and person to company relationships. Make a graph.

When you start banging those two graphs together you’ll probably find interesting things that could target some hands on investigative work.

That’s just an example - and we’re just at the very first stages of exploring how semantics can improve journalism and news consumption. This promises to be an exciting few years.

Again, thanks for the article.

Regards