Good week and good progress from two projects that are near and dear to my heart.

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1) Summize released a location feature that isolates comments and conversations to a geographic area. Great for getting a sense of events (tech meetup NY vs tech meetup SF) and happenings (see what people IN CHINA are saying about the earthquake vs people in Columbus, Ohio)

We pitched this feature and more importantly the concept of Conversation Search and the Global Conversation at the Tech Meetup in New York last night. Watch the video if you’d like.

Positive momentum in terms of traffic in the last 4 weeks since the April launch of Summize’s Twitter search

(new graph inserted – summize.com is now search.twitter.com and the old graph no longer shows valid data)

2) Calais (or OpenCalais) set forth a new release of its free semantic tagging service. Folks – if you haven’t checked this one out you really should. It’s a groundbreaking free service for publishers who want to automatically tag content and generate metadata. The new release offers an enhanced set of things it will recognize in content. One biggie is pop culture… now Calais is ready for autotagging all of the entertainment content out there. Good step forward. There are also several other features included in the release such as simplified results, Drupal support and a snazzy new website.

Until this week Calais has offered a service that’s open for developers – not as useful or accessible to non-coders like me. That changed this week as the new Tagaroo WordPress plugin was also released. Going to put that up here as soon as I get a few minutes. Also, there are an impressive set of third-party apps from the developer community growing up around Calais – many good projects there too.

Another thing to note that’s just plain jawdropping is Firef.ly. It’s community browsing and commenting – without a browser plugin. Very cool. It’s a Betaworks company – one of many cool things coming from there. Very happy to be advising and spending time with John Borthwick, Andy Weissman and the crew.

There are several other interesting things going on. For another day.