We hope to meet as many members of the OpenCalais community as possible.  Toward that end, here is a list of the September events where we are presenting and/or holding workshops. 

We would love to see you there, so let us know if you can make it!

The Calais team is heading to some great events this fall, including the Defrag Conference in Denver, Colorado, Nov. 3 - 4, 2008.

Time Sensitive Defrag Discount: The Defrag gang has kindly offered a special discount for the OpenCalais community.

The discounted rate -- $100 off the early bird registration fee (so $895.00) -- is only available through the end of this month.   

Calais R3 Technology Preview Now Available

Release 3 of Calais is now available for testing. Given the enormous increase in the number of production users of Calais we have modified our release process to incorporate a Technology Preview of new releases to allow for testing and experimentation. Of course, the production Calais service remains up and fully functional during the R3 Technology Preview period.

The details on accessing the technology preview are located here. 

This is a long post, so I’ll highlight the significant changes right here:

We've just done a fun interview with The Guardian's Jemima Kiss, which you can find here: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2008/08/reuters_labs_brews_more_conten.html

As you can see, Reuters Spotlight Content API, found at http://spotlight.reuters.com, now features integration with Calais, enabling you to build news apps that include fully metatagged Reuters news.

Calais Release 3 is Coming!

In the next couple of days we’re going to announce the availability of a technology preview of Calais R3.

In the past new releases have been done “in place” and have simply replaced the existing web service. Given both the increasing number of production services built on top of Calais and the ever increasing number of developers – we’re going to do this a little differently in the future.

R3 will be made available as a Technology Preview for approximately two weeks before being shifted to production. This preview period will allow developers to test their applications and provide us with feedback if anything doesn’t look right.

We're all immersed in thinking about where the web is headed. Whether we call it web 3.0, the Semantic Web or whatever. We're so immersed we often have difficulty in explaining why it is important in a simple, coherent and business-relevant manner.

Well, we've just discovered that an unknown percentage of the emails that have been sent to *@opencalais.com have gone missing over the last couple of weeks. Obviously - we don't know what % never arrived.

If you've sent us an email and haven't heard back from us - we'd really appreciate it if you sent it along again. It was getting kind of quiet here.

Growth pains. 

Tom

Photo credit J. Kiss

Matthew Buckland has written up his experience using the Calais API, Calais Tagaroo and other services to bring semantic intelligence to South Africa's Mail & Guardian Online. 

Eran Steinmetz has integrated Calais into MOSS 2007, making it easy to automatically generate semantic metadata for your content pages on Miscrosoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 content management sites. 

To learn more, please see the MOSS 2007 + Calais resource page on CodePlex, and see Amir Shevat's blog post in the integration. 

Ouch.

The shouting is over, the battlefield is quiet and it's time to take stock. 

Today between approximately 3:00 and 3:50 EST we had periods of downtime for both the Calais web site and the Calais web service. Depending on your network provider and location in the world you may have seen intermittent outages or a period of sustained downtime. 

Here's what happened. At about 3:00 our primary DNS provider (who shall remain unnamed and never spoken of again) went completely dark and our backup DNS configuration was incorrect. The net result was that while the Calais servers were up, running and ready to work - users could not access them.