Topify is back with a new team!

It is my pleasure to announce that after almost one and a half years in the wilderness, induced by me finishing my studies and moving to a new country, and my designer fellow opting to take up his own firm full time, Topify is finally back on track. As I have no expertise, skill, or talent in either design or serious marketing, I was reluctant to push this project on without a proper partner on my side. But alas, I have found one in the form of JoyGroup, a small but rapidly growing and ambitious web agency from Almere, Netherlands.

The structure of the project has also slightly changed. We have decided to use the name Topify for our main topic-based aggregation/analysis service, and make it a platform that will be reusable in many different ways. Of course, the first product that we will be launching based on Topify will be a blog-searching service that was the initial goal of mine, but further developments will include a full API, with a bunch of services around it, including a host of Drupal modules!

Watch this space for more announcements in the very near future.

Under Re-Construction

Sorry for not writing for a such a long time, but the Topify team has been quite busy with the personal life in the last 1.5 months to make any sort of huge progress. We have successfully launched our alpha version during the so-called Developers Day last month and met a lot of positive and supportive feedback. The main part of the site that most people were missing is some sort of community-like area, which was planned to be done next, but…

..but apparently we haven’t thought everything through when we started developing the site. So due to this, we were, unfortunately, stuck with a site design that didn’t allow for too many Web 2.0 features and a CMS that is a bit behind in this area. So after some consideration, we decided to switch both. The design has been much improved and looks sleeker than ever, which is a real joy. We have also switched our CMS and after a short period of porting the old stuff, we’re back on track and developing the final features quicker than ever. This said, there is still work to be done before we can launch a stable public beta. I’m not going to do the silly mistake of estimating a launch date again, but, to be honest, I’m kind of tired of developing in stealth mode and just want to get the thing out into the wild as soon as it goes. Unleash the beast on you! Yes, you! and YOU! Don’t run away!

Topify launching private alpha at Developers’ Day

Yes, it’s finally this far! We are violently beating at our keyboards and mouse buttons to finish up what seems like an alpha version of an exciting product. We still have some features missing completely, but the main bulk of the Topify world – blog topic mining and analytics – is done and awaiting first tests and reviews.

We will launch this first private alpha at a public, yet very small developers meeting hosted by the Chair for Information Systems and Databases at the RWTH Aachen University where me and my partner are still happily employed at the moment. The meeting is called “Developers’ Day” and has been staged for a couple of years now, with a host of interesting topics on current developments in – surprise – development of different software. You can visit the official page of the meeting here and drop by if you’re in Aachen. I should have posted this earlier, but if you really want to come, just come, it won’t be a problem. :)

After this, we will try to implement the last part of the site – the personal area – as quick as possible, consider all the suggestions from the alpha testers and launch for the public! These are hard times for start ups obviously and, as our application feedback form the seedcamp competition suggests, the market we’re entering has already some strong players, but we hope to bring a fresh perspective to blogs and topics. So, for the 1324145th time, stay tuned and we hope you will like Topify.

Topify + seedcamp = Love?!

Well, I hope you all know what seedcamp is and if not visit www.seedcamp.com to find out. To put it shortly, seedcamp is a week-long startup incubator where enterpreneurs get to meet experts from different fields and learn important lessons on how to manage to startup.

Why am I posting this? Well mostly because we have applied for seedcamp 2008! We were able to put together a live, but not yet fully functional, prototype web site for the application and hope that the judges will find our service exciting enough to invite us to London on the 3rd July for the shortlist interview. The decision will fall on August 25th and I’ll keep you all fully informed.

The good news for all of you is that we’re trying extra hard to get into seedcamp and have hence doubled and tripled our effort to get a beta site running as soon as possible. So expect more exciting news at the end of this or at the beginning of next month. :) Cheers.

Topify Gets a Face

Yay! After months of pushing ideas, planning the concept and just being lazy as usual, the work on the Topify web site has finally kicked off “for real”. It’s not a lot yet, but we have a design and some good ideas, mostly aiming towards being user-friendly, intuitive and easily usable. The technical stuff is nearly complete as well, so it’s now a matter of combining and adjusting the algorithms and the web stuff. This might take some time still, since we’re only a 2-man-team with studies and part-time work to attend to as well, but we’re doing all things possible to bring this project to life as soon as possible! :) Cheers.

What People Say When They T..alk

This is a challenging question that comes up all the time in our everyday life. This includes anything from the “normal” face-to-face communication when two people meet on the street to blog entries and instant messages or tweets on the Web. As a matter of fact, this is the main topic of a great ReadWriteWeb post titled “What People Say When They Tweet“. I’m really glad to see that the survey performed by the RWW blog and Summize doesn’t stop on calculating the most frequent words and phrases, since those only reflect our emotions and current activities (e.g. lol, ;), working, sleeping). Instead, they try to extract the topics of conversations, further dividing these into short-term and long-term discussions (e.g. about a “Lost” episode vs. US election).

I find the results truly fascinating, since this is a kind of information that is really hard to obtain directly. What these results show is an extremely simplified reflection of the matters that in one way or the other bother us at a certain point in time. It’s a bit sad that the results show less than 10 topics per day, since there must be tens and hundreds of others that have a big enough population as well. It’s just normal that some themes that are common to all the population of a country, like the US election, will dominate all the discussions for a long time. This can be compared to a cloud of 100 topics, where one, the election, completely dominates the rest, but there are hundreds of others around it, that shouldn’t be neglected, considering that there are millions of potential topics.

But no need to be sad! Since this is exactly what Topify is aiming to provide all its’ users – an overview of the topics that are burning the fingertips of all those who are ardently blogging away in an effort to make oneself heard. We hope to make your everyday experience at this project’s site as fascinating as that one post on RWW, with the difference that we are aiming to concentrate on the more structural and constructive communication area – the blogosphere. Excited already? :)

Welcome to Topify!

Hello and welcome to the official blog of Topify!

What is Topify you ask? No? Well, we’ll tell you anyway. Topify is a project aiming to extract and provide you with the intrinsic subject for all those news articles and blog posts that appear en masse everyday on the Web. This problem occurred to me while working on my Master thesis on political communication online, when I noticed that while there is a lot of content out there that you know deals with the topics you want to examine or inform yourself on or just read about, it is not an easy task to filter it out properly.

Sure, there are blog directories and tagging communities, which, don’t take me wrong, are a great thing to have, but sometimes when you’re just looking for some facts and thoughts on.. say rubber stamps (the political ones) you end up with blog entries just calling someone a rubber stamp without much of an explanation or something similar to that. What is much harder to come by is a piece of writing like this, really dedicated to those politicians who, according to the new Safire’s Political Dictionary “take orders from a political leader or [are] dominated by orders from higher up.”

So while the world of online news and blog posts is prospering like never before, the options on how to browse all this data remain rather scant. At the moment, if you don’t tag your content right, you run the risk of being missed by a significant part of your potential target audience because sometimes people just want to read about one exact topic and not all the posts tagged with a generalized concept. This is where we at Topify hope to be able to build a system that can extract those natural topics from news items and blog posts for everyone to discover and talk about.

If I could get you interested, come around again to this blog for further thoughts and discussions on this and related topics. The project itself is still in development, but with your suggestions it could become great addition to your favorite social web sites as soon as this Summer. Stay tuned! :)