Digger helps categorize and tag content

Tim Musgrove talks about Digger's new product for pubishers

If you're a publisher or an aggregator of content, check out Digger as a way to organize and categorize your content.

In this segment, Bambi Francisco continues her discussion with Tim Musgrove, CEO of TextDigger.

BF: You are launching a new product for publishers to help them automate the tagging and categorizing, which is a real pain for publishers. So let's take a look here to see exactly what publishers can expect. We're taking a look now at which site?

TM: It's the Star Telegram and we're looking at this newspaper - The McClatchy for the Dallas Fortworth area. We're in the middle of the index to see how many topics we are generating.

BF: So these are topics that your technology pulled out.

TM: That's right. There's no need for an editorial staff with human labor to define the 5000 official topics of the newspaper. Instead, it comes though the articles and says this is what is getting talked about on your newspaper.

BF: We looked at the automotive industry. So what is your service doing?

TM: What our service is doing is that it has pulled out of tens of thousands of newspaper articles that there are a cluster of them in the automotive industry and here's the beginning and you can click more. Then our tool goes and grabs relevant photos, videos, and blogs from around the Web. It shows related topics, so no humans have to be involved in the data to keep it up to date because it just refreshes itself.

BF: I'm sure there are editors in the media industry that are fuming at you right now since you're creating new technology that replaces their jobs. Is this a value proposition to online newspapers out there? After all, a lot of journalists do their own tagging. 

TM: Well the Star Telegram has tens of thousands of topics that are talked about so that's asking for a lot of tagging. It's like herding cats to get all of the journalists to use the same tagging system. One will write Federal Reserve and the other one will write Fed. So it's calling two things the same name and this fixes that problem.

BF: So you bring that together? The Fed and Federal Reserve will fall into one category?

TM: Absolutely. For example, if you look at addiction, we have Alcoholics Anonymous and Drub Rehabs and more that are all placed under the topic of addiction.

BF: How are you working with McClatchy? What's the model here?

TM: Well, it's a volume-based subscription price. Based on how many articles they ask us to tag, there is a monthly fee and it is a matter of making sure that they get enough clicks and enough Google traffic to their page.

BF: How much do they pay you for, say 1000 articles?

TM: About 1000 articles in a day is fairly medium volume. We may charge a couple thousand bucks a month.

BF: And on top of that, there are additional fees. If there's click throughs to articles that you serve up, what else do you get out of it?

TM: We'll let publishers pay a flat fee if they want to. We'll look at other kinds of models if they want to look at revenue share.

BF: Is this your push into the media industry to help them organize categories?

TM: Yes, it's one of the big pushes. We had about 10 beta customers that are pretty similar name brands that are going to be coming out in the next 90 days.

BF: Who are the other sites and publishers you are working with?

TM: We are working with Health Central, CNet, and a few others.