Media River and ClickSurge

I don't cover the web applications anymore but a pitch for a company called MediaRiver, formerly known as Intellext, got me curious.

I checked out their press release today and, wow!, there's more jargon in there than I could handle.

Here's what the company says their latest product called ClickSurge does:

ClickSurge, MediaRiver's new offering, enables Web publishers to guide
Internet users to the publishers' online content in a discovery-based
contextual model.

Good luck trying to understand that and how the technology works just from the press release!

I checked out the website and here's what, I think, is going on.

Intellext, as Media River was formerly called, created a product called Watson, a desktop program accessible from within Microsoft Office or Internet Explorer. As a user works on a topic, Watson running in background can look for relevant documents from the Web and bring it to the user without having to open a browser. Watson integrates with Google search and other search engines and the company positions it as a "search engine of search engines."

ClickSurge will customize the Watson idea for content publishers on the Web. Here's an example from a Chicago Sun-Times article on the company:

If a user at the People magazine Web site reads an article on Britney Spears, ClickSurge will match a dozen or more words, and offer "next clicks" to links to other articles relating to Spears. In contrast, many Web sites generate random links, which are less likely to hook readers and get them to stay at a Web site. Such sites, in this case, might offer links to more general entertainment news or even randomly selected links.

Not having seen a ClickSurge demo I am not sure how effective it will be. But the ClickSurge pitch reminds me of similar attempts being made by Claria.

Claria was once derided for having software that acted suspiciously like spyware. The company almost filed for IPO before all the negative publicity around spyware forced it to back out. In 2005, Claria decided to reinvent itself and offer publishers a personalization platform.

I need to look at Media River more closely to figure out the overlap between them and Claria.