iGlue challenges users to Wikify-the-Web with $40k in cash prizes

Designed to mark the company’s full launch after four years of development, iGlue, in partnership with one of its backers, Power of the Dream Ventures (PDV), is launching “The iGlue Summer Annotation Challenge” with cash prizes totaling $40k.

Putting to one side the question as to whether this is money well spent compared to other forms of marketing, the competition, which kicks off today and will last through to August 31st, asks users to download iGlue’s browser add-on or install the bookmarklet and help Wikify the Web.

Cash and other prizes will then be awarded to those who contribute the most “relevant, value added content”. That’s because iGlue does a lot of the heavy lifting via its semantic technology, which conducts linguistic analysis of text on a web page and matches this to known entities and data points in its growing database.

It’s a pretty big database too consisting of 83 million data points, including over 7 million entities, with over 38 million semantic connections between them, including over three million geographical locations, more than one million names, and more than two hundred thousand institutional name entries. But that doesn’t mean iGlue doesn’t need more help from users, hence the cash-rich competition.

The bigger picture is to create an additional information layer over the Web by combining machine processing with user-generated content in which the user community adds their own entries and data, potentially turning any website into a Wikipedia-like resource. These can be in the form of ‘sticky notes’ or images, video, maps and links from the likes of Google, Bing, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Amazon and eBay.