Jiglu: enterprise-level tagging starts at free

Intelligently tagging the content on a site can be done either by hand as the content is created, or with some kind of text analysis algorithm. But the former is inefficient and time-consuming, while the latter can be expensive. Jiglu, which launches an official beta today, plans to tackle tagging in two ways. First with a free, ad-supported widget, which aims to re-point site visitors to further internal content, thus lifting page views and ad-revenue. Secondly with a white-label/OEM service for bigger content providers which will be disruptive to the normally more expensive enterprise systems.

Jiglu was in the Demo pit at TechCrunch40 and attracted some interest at the time, but made no announcement then. Today it is going after news sites and blogs, which want to suggest extra, in-site material but have so far had to tag the content by hand. It is often forgotten that tagging is a largely manual game. So anything that can automate the process, creating dynamic links and tags, and taking readers deeper into other content, is welcome.

Available for use with any English language website, the Jiglu javascript widget sends out a call for Jiglu’s servers to break down posts into component parts and analyze how the content fits together. Once the relationships are established, Jiglu tags and links to the content. Jiglu is also capable of aggregating up to 10 blogs or websites, working out the connections between the content. The free widget will be supported by advertising – initially AdSense – against its search results. You can see the widget running on a blog here.

But more interestingly, Jiglu is also launching a white-label version for sites with over a million monthly page impressions that will be fee-based rather than free. This means all the results will have the Jiglu branding removed in favour of the site’s brand. CEO Nigel Cannings told me that content providers will also get a better understanding of how users are moving through their sites as the OEM version produces analytics.

This is potentially a bigger source of revenue for Jiglu than it’s ad-based widget, especially since enterprise-level systems to tag content are typically very expensive. If Jiglu can do as good as or even nearly as good a job as, say an Autonomy, but for a much more competitive price, then it become a properly disruptive service. Autonomy and other similar services require serious integration. Jiglu is just a line of Javascript. You do the math.

It’s therefore no surprise to learn that Jiglu is actually a re-named and re-launched enterprise service. Formerly known as Mailspaces, its tool to analyze email traffic became what Jiglu is today. Enterprise’s loss is the blogger’s gain.

The firm behind Jiglu is coming out of the UK but, says Cannings, is basically going to be running the bulk of its operation out of Silicon Valley. Funding has come from UK VCs, including Oxford Technology Partners.