Questions about OPEN CALAIS?

As the maintainer of the OpenCalais module I can say that it does not do anything like you are suggesting. The integration provides metadata for your nodes as Vocabularies and Terms as well as additional disambiguated data via Views integration. There is no content replacement with links to opencalais.com. It does not alter your page titles like you suggest. There is one views field that will link to an OpenCalais Linked Data page but it is a URI that points there, you don't need to use it.

I think you may be jumping to conclusions here without having used the module or fully understood the agreement. As far as I know, and I'll let others with more information add on, they are just asking that if you use their *free* service, you give them some attribution on your site somewhere.

Tom Tague from the OpenCalais initiative here.

There are enough points made in your post that I thought it would be worthwhile to respond to each one where applicable.

First – I think we need some clarifications. OpenCalais is a web service. It is plumbing and you can build whatever you’d like on top of it. The OpenCalais modules for Drupal are produced by our partner Phase2Technology. They utilize the web service to provide a series of useful extensions to Drupal functionality. Basically every aspect of OpenCalais for Drupal is user-customizable. If that customization doesn’t suit your needs you should just jump in and modify the code.

I think perhaps you skimmed the OpenCalais terms of service with some preconceptions in mind. If you go back and read them carefully I think you’ll see that we ask for very little. There’s no required hyperlinking other than one link somewhere on your site for attribution. No advertising. Very generous daily usage limits.

Reading the Open Calais agreement it says you must keep their logo as is, and associated links must link to their home page.

In fact what it says is simply that we want attribution somewhere on your site. We’re fine with a copy of our logo and the link to our homepage on an about page or elsewhere where it won’t impact your site’s look and feel. There are absolutely no other requirements for linking anything anywhere.

Now, I thought before I enabled this thing I should make a posting to get some input from Drupalers.
Most of us are interested in content, especially if it is easy to acquire that along with wider exposure to more of the web.
SEO is a big enough pain keeping your sites showing up as well as you can in the searches.

Open Calais reminds me of Zemanta, which is nothing but a hyperlink Spam tool in disguise. I never quite got to the heart of the matter with Zemanta, but I did remove it from all my sites. Zemanta pokes all kinds of links into your site content when you use their tools that facilitate easy content development on your sites. If you look at you content in the Unfiltered HTML after applying some Zemanta there is so much junk in the code it's a wonder it runs.

I won’t speak to Zemanta but OpenCalais is a pretty straightforward service. It extracts the semantic metadata from your text and returns it to you. The OpenCalais modules for Drupal take that metadata and do some interesting things like allow you to automatically tag content or create topic pages or related content sections. Every component of what OpenCalais for Drupal does is customizable and under user control. If you don’t like what it’s doing you should feel free to modify the code to suit your purposes.

I'm not knocking anyone. I just like to know the facts before I eat the cheese, it may be rotten. LOL

After reading the Open Calais agreement I thought better of applying it on the site I'm working. I honestly don't know it will make that much difference, and it sure as heck alters my meta data on my site, along with pages titles, etc. Maybe I would get better exposure on the web or maybe not.

Ummh, it’s goal is to alter the metadata on your site – well at least to provide richer and more diverse metadata without additional editorial cost. That metadata is fundamental to the whole OpenCalais concept. If you don’t want more metadata you definitely shouldn’t be using OpenCalais.

There is a paid for services available, but I haven't reviewed it. It may not have all the linking requirements of use. I don't have a big problem with " A link", but a myriad of links and junk to other sites is nothing, but a hyperlink spam tool disquised as an SEO and easy content builder, i.e., Zemanta

OpenCalais doesn’t generate links to other sites – period. The Drupal modules do provide you with the option to integrate links to current news and other off-site content – but this is an option you can turn on or off. The professional versions of Calais are identical to the free version but offer higher volume limits and service level agreements. And again – “all the linking requirements” is one link, one time, somewhere on your site.

I read a thing on Lullabot explaining it, but that doesn't address pervasive issues I'm talking about.

If you have experience with the Open Calais and associated modules I sure appreciate reading any comments or suggestions. Like everyone else I can always use help with SEO and Content, so I would enjoy to read good reviews. However, I'm not into ignoring factual information or comments good or bad.