Segala might have fixed Blacknight’s blackday

That’s the title of a post written by Sam Sethi, publisher of Vecosys. I couldn’t have picked a better title if I tried, thanks Sam. I’m now going to use this opportunity to blog Segala‘s entire strategy at a high level, as I’m getting a lot of people asking about what we do, mainly because the current corporate Web site paints around 10% of the picture.

So, we’re starting to catch some well deserved limelight now that the ecosystem we’re building is starting to come together. I’m scheduled to do some interviews with mainstream bloggers soon too, so that should help promote Content Labels to a whole new level.

If you’re a blogger or Podcaster and wish to be kept informed, please feel free to get in touch and I’ll gladly provide you with a special feed to ensure you’re the first to know. It’s all based on the Semantic Web, so it’s a topic that was starting to gain traction late last year.

I must admit, it feels a little strange being covered on a site dedicated to start-ups and at the same time, it’s quite flattering for obvious reasons. We purposely kept our heads below the media radar since 2002, so it’s hardly surprising if most people haven’t heard of us before now. A lot of the stuff we’re now talking about is very new also, or at least, new to the vast majority.

Most people in Ireland certainly wouldn’t have heard of us (or me personally) as the vast majority of our revenue is generated outside of Ireland and I’ve been in the UK since leaving AOL in 1998 (wow, has it really been that long?!). Perhaps I need to spend more time at HQ in Dublin where most of the work is done, even if only to top up the accent.
It’s better to engage

We’re soon to launch a newly designed Web site that will reside on WordPress and with of course, a new Web 2.0 theme. The Web 2.0 look and blog functionality will give a new fresh and engaging feel to the company. This will help us to be (and perceived as being) more engaging with industry peers. This is especially important if we’re to get buy-in for new product offerings such as the baseline we’re creating for our Web accessibility Trustmark to help sites like blogs claim conformance more easily and at very low cost.

Building trust takes time but we’re getting there

Below is a summary of the ecosystem we’re building to help demonstrate how Content Labels will be the talk of the town in 2007. In my personal opinion, Content Labels is a fantastic implementation of the Semantic Web. As a member of the W3C Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) special interest group I’ll be making it my business to highlight Labels as a major use case to demonstrate real benefits of the Semantic Web to end users.

Content Labels

Content Labels are files that contain metadata, enabling search engines and browsers to find Web sites that claim conformance to a standard or code of conduct. This in turn enables users to specify in search preferences, ‘display only sites that conform to this code of conduct’.

Segala was instrumental in the creation and promotion of Content Labels and with co sponsors such as ICRA, Yahoo!, Vodafone, T-Online and others, we created the first ever W3C incubator project to help formalise Content Labels as a formal method of labelling content. It’s now moving on to a full recommendation track to become an official standard this year.

Users may only wish to see sites that conform to standards such as W3C Web Accessibility Guidelines or W3C Mobile Web Initiative (MWI) Best Practices (mobileOK), or codes of conduct for say, blogs, e-commerce, advertising, child protection, quality, adult orientated and so on.

The makeup of Content Labels is maturing every day, with pretty solid schemas and vocabularies for a number of implementations already. They’re becoming recognised as a worthy method of labelling content to help users find accessible Web sites and sites that are deemed appropriate for children using the ICRA label.

Creating new codes of conduct

Anyone can create a code of conduct to enable more trust within their industry. A code for blogs is looking like a ripe idea to start with. We’ve instigated a non-commercial site to encourage industry to create, debate, stimulate and adopt new codes. So, get involved if you want to help enable more trust on the Web.

We already have some respected bloggers involved, we even have some volunteers to help create a wiki, blog and brand identity. There’s a lot to do so we need as much help, endorsement and adoption as possible. Other W3C members are involved in the initiative also. You don’t need to be a techie as the necessary technical stuff will be done by other contributors. http://contentlabel.org

According to Daniel Appelquist, Chair of the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices working group

Bottom line: content labels built on top of open standards mean more machine-readable data on the Web, which translates to better user experience and ease of use. Verification of these labels mean a more trustable Web.
Labels are definitely coming into the mainstream. I fully expect content labels to be a ubiquitous within the next two years — users won’t necessarily even know they exist, but they will be silently improving the trustability and usability the Web.

Sam has done a great job at explaining how Content Labels work in plain speak, so his blog is a good reference. Alternatively you can read what Tom Raftery has to say, his is equally well written. The current official site explaining the entire process using screen shots can be found at http://searchthresher.com

Firefox extension

Our cool Firefox extension (working name Search Thresher) which reads Content Labels was released for beta recently. We haven’t promoted it yet and it’s the first build of many to come. Lots of new features will be delivered each month and it should make its way into Mozilla labs soon.

Microsoft are paying us to build an IE plugin, so we’ll make a start on that soon. If only Opera would show the same support.

Increasing adoption

Segala recently launched a partner network of companies that are now permitted to audit, certify and label Web sites on Segala’s behalf. More labelled Web sites makes the argument to read labels more compelling for mainstream browsers and search engines.

Google is co-editor of the W3C mobileOK document with Segala and ICRA. Conformance to mobileOK is in the form of a Content Label, so what does that say about the future of mobile search? We believe it won’t be long before search ranking on the desktop is improved to provide more trust to end users.

So, if you design, build or test Web sites, or sell Web based products then why not learn more about the Web accessibility partner programme now. We make it easy by providing marketing collatoral, tools and technical support.

We’re working on more stuff which I can’t disclose at this time.

Now that we can demonstrate the company’s potential we’re looking for external investment to expand the business and importantly, the partner programme worldwide. This shouldn’t be too difficult though as we’re not just another Web 2.0 ‘widget company’. You don’t get many companies that turnover €2.2m in year 1 and in profit within months I’ve had about 5 investors ranging from Ireland, UK, Europe and the Valley, all register their interest. Unfortunately we’ve been spending all our time to growing the business and less time on the business plan. We’re 99.9% there so they can expect to get an email from me very soon!

Ok, so now we’re wearing our heart on our sleeve. I hope you enjoyed my wee epic novel. Check out the events page to keep an eye out for my appearance as a keen networker, spearker, or facilitator