Bronte Media

Coolspotters is an app that let’s users structure information around celebrities. For instance, I can see that Lauren from The Hills uses a Blackberry Curve and eats at Pinkberry.

Fascinating, right? No? Bueller? Well, for semantic web technologies to actually work they first need structured information, which a lot of startups have seem to have skipped.

There is Wikipedia, which has some basic structure but even that is horribly inadequate. There needs to be a lot more Coolspotters-like sites trying to solve the user contribution interface to get more structured information.

And then the sexy search and navigation tools can be applied over the data.

The company behind Coolspotters is Fanzter, and investors include such Seattle financiers as Rich Barton and Second Avenue Partners (even though the company is based in Connecticut).

Venturebeat has a nice write up of the company here. In all of the profile there were two words that were deafeningly absent: ’semantic web’. And that’s a good thing.

If Coolspotters are successful in solving the contribution of structured information, overnight they’ll be able to turn on semantic tools that deliver on all that promise you hear about. Either way, it’s great to see they are solely focused on just the contributed information and getting it structured.

Do I think the vertical is interesting? Absolutely not. Celebrities are up there with restaurant reviews in terms of traffic to dollar ratios.

But there will be no doubt some VC who will get a boner over large Paris Hilton fuelled page views and a ’semantic web’ slide in the powerpoint deck when these guys try to no doubt raise a series B or C round, assuming they make progress. And then they can take the lessons they learnt and apply it to more higher value pursuits.