VentureBeat

The so called “semantic web” is on its way — or, according to Adaptive Blue CEO Alex Iskold, already here, and just waiting for the right applications to exploit it.

With the latest release of his company’s application BlueOrganizer, a FireFox plug-in that provides a way of browsing the web with more intelligence at your fingertips, the wait is about over.

BlueOrganizer lets you do things like right-click on words on a page to pull in more information about the words, even supplying links about where can buy it (if it is a product), or book a ticket (if it is an event).

Indeed, the semantic web is all about making data understandable so that computers can help make connections meaningful to humans, and Adaptive Blue focuses on specific niches in order to make the process of building those connections easier.

BlueOrganizer’s approach is to organize data on a page by categories of consumer interest, like blogs, books, movies and restaurants.

If you had the plug-in and I made a mention in this post, for instance, of the book “A Thousand Blazing Suns” by Khaleid Hosseini, BlueOrganizer would highlight the name, provide further information and links to buy the book, learn more about it or share it with others.

We’ve written about this application before. New to the application, however, is the ability to access info like a name and address that has been microformated, meaning it’s tagged within the HTML created by the page designer. Right click anywhere within it and you’ll be able to automatically map the location or check out nearby restaurants.

Or, for a person, right-click on their name and be able to shoot off to their Facebook or Twitter profile, look them up on Wikipedia if they’re famous, and so forth.

Iskold calls it a “top-down” approach to the semantic web. Rather than tagging data before it’s placed on the Internet, BlueOrganizer looks at what’s already present and uses it to help people in their ordinary browsing activities.

In the process, it’s re-structuring the way its users navigate the web by providing a browser-based overlay to websites that users navigate by, rather than the links alone within pages.

For the most part, the new additions to BlueOrganizer are logical extensions to what already existed in the program (which we’ve previously written about). The six-person team has been periodically putting out new releases that progressively make the plug-in more powerful.

AdaptiveBlue competes with a number of other startups that tag data, although many have an opposite approach, counting on web designers to include them in the code of the page. Other, larger rivals will probably eventually include a larger semantic web startup like Twine (coverage here), although its implementation is somewhat different, or PeoplePad, a stealth startup we recently wrote about with secretive plans to do something that sounds quite similar to BlueOrganizer.

The company took $1.5 million from Union Square Ventures in early 2006, and is currently considering another round.

Updated

AdaptiveBlue now enables bloggers to add semantically rich “smart links” to their blogs.

Smart links (see left for how they look) are basically links on steroids. They are marked by an icon floating next an otherwise normal-looking link. Clicking on this icon opens a small window with lots of helpful options related to the link itself (see example at far bottom).

These smart links take the power of AdaptiveBlue’s BlueOrganizer FireFox extension out of the browser and onto the web. You can read about BlueOrganizer here. You can create a smart link to sites that fall into any of the 30-plus categories that BlueOrganizer supports, which range from anime to books, music, wine, travel and food.

For example, if you create a smart link to a site about a Jack Johnson, clicking on the icon brings up links to buy his albums on Amazon, eBay and AllMusic. You can also instantly add them your Amazon Wishlist, find lyrics, and see what people are saying on Metacritic. Similarly, smart links to a site about a restaurant display links to reviews from Yelp and CitySearch, maps from Google Maps, and more.

This is all done automatically. When you create a smart link to a website, BlueOrganizer analyzes the content and metadata of the page and does all the work. To use smart links, a site publisher first must add some code to his or her blog’s template, bookmark a page using the the browser extension, and then select a tab called “create a smart link.” The software then generates some HTML, which you then embed, and that’s it.

As part of the upgrade, AdaptiveBlue has also simplified the interface of its plug-in, enabling you to access all of its functions from one button that sits next to your navigation bar. It has also powered up its contextual analysis technology; you can now highlight a sentence or phrase in a page, right click and get rich information related to the selected text.

Because it aims to take up real-estate next to links, it competes with Snap, and some of its functions are similar to Sphere. Neither product offers the same breadth and power.

AdaptiveBlue, which is based in Livingston, New Jersey, raised an undisclosed sum from Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures earlier this year. The CEO, Alex Iskold, also frequently contributes to the blog Read/Write Web.

AdaptiveBlue, a Livingston N.J. company, gives you a browser plug-in that allows you to research and organize more easily from sites within Firefox.

The company said it has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Union Square Ventures in New York.

If you right-click on a book title, for example, AdaptiveBlue’s software provides you a little menu with more information about the book and other options. It lets you do a search for the book on Amazon (or, if you prefer, other book sites) or find out more about the author via a Google or Yahoo search. Or you can tag it at delicious, or share it with your friends. Or if you’re on a site with music titles, you can right-click on a title and get more info on the title and author (see example below for Norah Jones).

The product is useful, however a plethora of plug-in companies exist now. It’s going to be hard to rise above the noise, even if AdaptiveBlue’s product is more advanced, extensive and cleaner than most others. It requires a download, yet says 340,000 people have downloaded it already.

Besides music, and books, AdaptiveBlue gives you similar research and organization options for 18 other categories, including wine, apparel, TV shows and blogs. If you’re on a blog site, you can find out more about the blog, subscribe to it, save it to Delicious, etc. Some features are nifty. If you’re looking at a movie title, AdaptiveBlue gives you an option to put the title straight into your Neflix account cue.

AdaptiveBlue does this by doing a semantic analysis of a Web page you are on, and then giving you options based on the material it finds. It plans to make money from a revenue cut from business it sends to its affiliates such as Amazon.