Orglex is a new semantic-web powered news, blog and job search engine with a social networking component and industry vertical focus. It’s an interesting service that brings together a number of different approaches we’ve seen elsewhere to build something relatively new.
Semantic analysis of content makes topic focused search smarter than otherwise possible, and wrapping it in other value adds like blog and job search is a smart, solid play.
The first step Orglex users take is to select from any of 30 industry “hubs,” collections of news feeds and resources organized around topics ranging from pharmaceuticals to social networking to management consulting.
The news section of each hub displays recent stories vetted by topical relevance via an industry specific ontology, combined with relative weighting of top sources according to how often they write about a particular sector (again determined by industry specific ontology). Its an interesting approach to news, a combination I don’t think I’ve seen before.
A news feed made up of all the hubs you select is then displayed on your Orglex page and is exportable in feed format. The company has a white-label version of its Venture News feed available on the leading blog VentureBeat, though this automated aggregation of links off-site doesn’t get very prominent billing there. No surprise and no knock on either company for that.
The feeds published by several of the hubs look like something worth subscribing to already. The most recent items in the “social networking” feed are on the left, judge for yourself.
In addition to news, Orglex also aggregates industry specific job listings from sites around the web and pages for people in each industry. The people section of the site seems inoperable right now and for a job aggregation site to try and to wring cache out of big brand icons as “featured employers” seems questionable.
One of the most interesting parts of the site is the leader board set up for each hub. Top sources are presumably indexed manually but ranked by the frequency with which they write about that hub’s topic, according to the ontology. I’m always looking for new ways to discover top sources in new niches and Orglex could be a good tool to put in that toolbox.
The whole site is a work in progress and that’s probably why Orglex hasn’t gotten any media coverage to date except for the Amazon Web Services blog post I discovered it through. None the less, it’s an interesting service to watch.
Readers interested in semantic web developments should check out the resources we’ve compiled on that and four other emerging key topics in the ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for 2008.
