One idea that has bounced in and out of my head for a couple of years now is to give website publishers and bloggers the ability to show in a widget, photos of people mentioned on a web page or blog post. In its simplest form, the widget could have an admin interface that would suggest match words in an article to names in a database of people - Facebook or Wink for example - and display their photos. Since a name could match to several people, the publisher could then pick and choose the actual matches.

In a more sophisticated approach, the widget could be based on some sort of semantic web technology whereby the identities of the people mentioned on a web page are automatically determined and relevant information gathered from various sources about them and displayed alongside their photos in the widget.

When I originally thought of the idea I conceived it as part of a people search engine and that the accuracy of results would somehow be improved by a) the contents of web pages that people are matched to and b) the contexts they are mentioned in. I guess I was thinking about the semantic web even before I was aware of it.

Interestingly and hence me posting about this now, I read today on VentureBeat about Adaptive Blue’s BlueOrganizer. I haven’t looked at the product closely enough yet but what I have read suggests that it could be adapted (pun intended) to provide this people-in-this-article service. It is something that print media have offered for decades - it should be easy for new media to do so too.