I've been hard at work on updating Semantic Focus, both from an articles standpoint as well as adding new features. Although larger, more hush-hush projects (Semantic Web/NLP related) loom on the horizon, I'd like to share with you a few changes you may have noticed around the blog, and how they are especially of benefit to our guest writers and other members of the Blogosphere.

Authors by activity (post count)

Authors of Semantic Focus articles are now being displayed on every blog page in the right sidebar under the heading "Authors by activity (post count)." The authors are arranged by the number of articles he or she has published. This is both for the benefit of the good people that have taken time to deliver fresh content to the Semantic Focus audience, as well as foster new guest authors to come forward and submit their material.

The true benefit for authors is the site-wide non-nofollow link to the author's homepage. This gives them exposure, traffic, and Googley weight. Thanks guys!

Latest blog mentions

Another "giving back" feature is "Latest blog mentions," also in the right sidebar of all blog pages. Using the Technorati Cosmos API, links to Semantic Focus are automatically indexed every few hours (by a trusty Python script), and those that are approved (manually to check for spam) appear in the blog mentions section. Like the author links, blog mentions do not carry the rel="nofollow" tag. This has the benefit of giving traffic and weight back to those who give exposure to this community.

Planet Semantic Focus

Quietly I've been tinkering with a blog indexing system of my own design, written in Python (lots of PyLove today). The blog indexer is currently working behind the scenes to gather more, and better, Semantic Web content from around the Web. I'm still experimenting with combining results from Technorti, Flickr and other sources. When the system is running smoothly and reliably I will change the Planet Semantic Focus index over to the new and improved one. Stay tuned!