Grapeshot replaces manual mark-up methods with an automatic way to link to related content and advertisements.

Publishers recognise the value of automation and use central Content Management Systems (CMS) to regulate how journalists' texts are templated to the digital screen. Whilst each page is no longer manually crafted, many of the ad tags used to drive display advertising and direct response still entail manual efforts.

Some the manual work remains - different CMS templates are designed to arrange different sections of a website. It means "News" can look different to "Motor", as much as "LifeStyle" looks different to "Business". Therefore different articles get a different visual treatment according to the destination editorial sections in which they are to appear.

Making the article look pretty is one thing, but this editorial process has other consequences. Articles are often classified according to the sections of the site they inhabit, rather than based simply on the content that lies within the written word. Most stories have several angles. The "celebrity footballer" story can be both "Sports" and "News", and a "wind turbine" story can be "Politics", "Technology" and Business.

Grapeshot saves time and money by automatically assessing the words on each page and assigning them one or more category. It means one page has many categories - and these categories can be inserted inside an ad tag and sent downstream to the ad server - in the few milliseconds it takes to load a fresh page view.

Real-time categorisation means that an article can have one category for one page view, and another category for a second page view. The category can be swapped or switched depending on other variables - for example the type of ad you are selling.

The editor saves the time having to create and manage categorisation at the point an article is written, and instead the ad sales team can apply categorisation as the page is loaded, to introduce maximum flexibility to optimize the volume of ads sold and placed in each virtual channel.

Grapeshot distils the essence of a page using keywords, and these keywords power the real-time categorisation for display ad channels, but can also power the selection of products from merchant databases or affiliate networks.

Again, no human has to pre-define the words to make a request to a Kelkoo product feed, for example. Grapeshot does the analysis of the page automatically and in real-time puts the best keywords first.

Editors save time marking up content with query specific HTML tags. Grapeshot makes real-time calculations and can drive related product and content requests using its own algorithms.

Editors like to cross-link content as it drives more traffic around the site. But peculiarly they can only link to articles that are older than the one they are writing now. Seemingly no-one can link to the unknown future, only to the past archive of articles.

However users read articles both old and new, so it is algorithms that must calculate relatedness in two directions. An old story needs to have links to new articles, so that the user can see up-to date references that add value to the original story written, which they are reading many days after publication date.

Grapeshot looks at the essence of every page and determines the overlap between stories. This helps to identify the best match articles that match the current story being reading - whether the articles are older or newer than the publication date.

More significantly Grapeshot can isolate those stories that are "me-too" and very identical, from those other stories that are related, but digress into a different angle or emphasis. Thus, using advanced clustering algorithms, Grapeshot can introduce several different editorial angles on the one story - providing a breadth of subject matter for the reader to discover.

As an automated editorial service, Related Articles delivered by algorithms replace the burden on journalists to tag, categorise or link their content. Instead the words on the page do the hard work - and for sure - the content is king!