South Africa’s Mail & Guardian newspaper has substantially revamped its website, in the process introducing a series of new features to improve usability.

M&G Online’s general manager Matthew Buckland blogged recently about the use of Thompson Reuters Open Calais semantic tagging technology to organise and cross-reference all the site’s content for the relaunch.

In addition to this the revamp has introduced a number of key features:

Registration and dashboard

• Like the Guardian in the UK, the new M&G site now allows users to save clippings of favourite articles and story history while browsing.
• Comment on articles and debate with other readers

New features

• It has also introduced a topics A-Z: A list of people, places, subjects and organisations covered by the site
• Added a feature – NewsSwarm – that allows users to see who is viewing which article in real time
• Integrated articles with Google Maps
• Make the popular cartoon sections searchable and tagged
• Added easy exploration of e-commerce areas: jobs, cars, dating, property and shopping
• Allowed users to view related articles from outside the news website.
• Added video feeds

Semantic tagging – a key new element

• Tag clouds of subjects, people and places on the home page and news sections
• Articles regionally organised and can be viewed by country or city with South African news at town, city or provincial level
• Articles are also tagged with names of cities, countries, companies or organisations, and people, which can be viewed in the Topics A-Z section