Zemanta ltd.

API Showcase: New Faviki release

2009-07-03T21:58:26Z

Our friends at Faviki write about their newest release and it’s super exciting. Before we dive into it, just a quick reminder what Faviki is – it’s a tool that brings together social bookmarking and Wikipedia. It lets you tag your bookmarks using Wikipedia concepts as tags.

The big news is addition of features to support CommonTag:

We are happy to announce the addition of several new features. The purpose of the new features is mainly to facilitate the use of common tags from Wikipedia, as well as to overcome Wikipedia’s limitations as a controlled vocabulary for semantic tags.Vuk Mili?i?, Faviki Blog, Jul 2009

they of course added other things, including:

Smarter autocomplete list The autocomplete list is an alternative way of finding and adding tags. It is now powered by DBpedia lookup – a powerful search API for Wikipedia concepts.

Converting tags This feature allows users to convert any of their tags to another tag across all of their bookmarks.

Spam control Bookmarks of no value for users can easily be marked as spam. Bookmarks that were marked as spam by a certain number of users are hidden.

Export/backup bookmarks Bookmarks can be exported along with semantic tags in the standard HTML bookmarks format.

Tag description tooltip A short abstract with an image, if there is any, shown when a mouse is held over a tag name, helps users choose the right tag. The data is fetched from DBpedia in real time.

Vuk Mili?i?, Faviki Blog, Jul 2009

They even include a nice screenshot of semantically tagging Zemanta, which was not possible before:

Users collaboratively decide the best URLs for a concept

You should give Faviki a try, it’s truly a next-generation bookmarking and tagging tool!

Release: New ReBlog

2009-07-02T23:17:10Z

Blogging is all about conversations across the social media sphere. We continue our work in this area. We’ve taken another look at our ReBlog feature and prepared an update to the user interface that should make it even easier for your readers to quote you on their blogs and continue the conversation.

new ReBlog

We’ve also fixed a number of bugs and made things faster in the process.

ReBlog a blog post today and let us know what you think of the new interface!

Featured user: Marshal Sandler

2009-07-01T00:52:24Z

Marshal Sandler is one of our most loyal users and probably also the oldest. We’re honored to have him follow our work and for his comments and links that he’s sending in our direction. That’s why I asked him to tell us a bit about his blog and his views on Zemanta. Here’s what he told us:

Prior to my Retirement and when using a PC All by Business Correspondence was written using Nota Bene so I am familiar with content creation-Being 73 years old and retired with promoting Social Media as a hobby Zemanta is the perfect application I can Tag Add Photos and add relevant articles-of others and my own-when you post you are publishing and the rules that apply are covered by Zemanta.

MarshalSandler.com is a playground of ideas, introductions, and synergies. Marshal exhibits a blogging style that is less about tamping out his thoughts and more about the juggling, rearranging, juxtaposing, and syndicating of the content of other people and companies – a communications cubism of sorts. There’s no room for crap, but there is plenty of room for friendly people with interesting ideas. Marshal’s day is the search for new technologies, new ideas, new relationships, and new things to curse happily about. So, participate. Cut bait.

Mission Statement by Jason Broadwater ; Web Hosting by Andy Quayle ; Site Engineering by Dr Lev Selector

Marshal is also publishing on http://msandler.tumblr.com/ and http://ms12.wordpress.com/ – check it out!

Would you like your blog to be featured here? Let us know.

Zemanta as part of Lifestreaming workflow

2009-06-28T05:14:52Z

Steve Rubel who is always on the cutting edge of social media and PR, recently switched from Blogging to Lifestreaming. While this move probably is not for everyone, it’s interesting to note how he’s handling the transition and his new proposed workflow:

A Lifestreaming Workflow by Steve Rubel

Zemanta’s GMail extension can be used here to find more related content such as blogs, links and images.

You should read his blog post and let us know in the comments what you think of this approach towards “blogging”.

API showcase: Linked Galaxy

2009-06-26T21:46:36Z

Sitting on such a powerful contextual API that returns semantic data is never easy for creative people. We announced a while ago that we output semantic data as part of our API results, meaning that we connect identified concepts to Linked Data cloud. Databases that we link to include Freebase, Semantic CrunchBase and DBpedia. In order to explore one of the possibilities that this brings to developers, @andraz created Linked Galaxy project.

Linked Galaxy is a tool that uses semantic entities that were identified by Zemanta in given text and connects it to DBpedia and Freebase by following connections between them. This way it’s possible to uncover underlying connections between the terms that might not be otherwise obvious to the writer. They are presented in a graph, making it easy to quickly scan the output.

A text about Hudson River landing earlier this year produces the following first order graph from DBpedia:

Once it’s expanded into second order, we can already see connections between the entities (click for bigger image):

Which can be further expanded with Freebase information (click for bigger image):

While all this might seem a bit overwhelming is shows how much information is already stored in Linked Data and the potential of the tools of the future that take this information and build new products and services on top of it.

Give Linked Galaxy a try yourself and let us know it goes. If you are interested in developing it further, we’d love to share the source with you.

Linked Data is the First Step towards a Semantic *Web* (aldobucchi.com)
MozCamp – linked media (squio.nl)
Putting Freebase in a Star Schema (gen5.info)
Next phase for semweb take up (squio.nl)

Vote for Zemanta in Techcrunch Europas awards

2009-06-25T21:57:23Z

: Image by fabiogis50 via Flickr

TechCrunch Europe is running a competition in which Zemanta was nominated as one of Best Web Application Or Service. We need you to vote for us, so we can get into finals!

How to vote: go to The Europas: Best Web Application Or Service (EMEA) blog post and find Zemanta on the list and click Vote.

Thanks!

Voting opens in the PollDaddy Powered TechCrunch Europa awards (polldaddy.com)

Tutorial: Getting Started with Zemanta

2009-06-25T06:03:07Z

Zemanta is a writing assistant that recommends you content while you write. It does that by extending your writing area, allowing you to keep the same work flow that you have while saving you time by not having to find additional content elsewhere. We support all the major blogging platforms as well as GMail and Yahoo Mail.

Step 1: Download Zemanta

Zemanta comes in three main flavors:

as a Browser Extension for Firefox and Internet Explorer 7/8 (supports all platforms)

as a plugin for Wordpress.org, MovableType and Drupal

as a plugin for Windows Live Writer

We also have book-marklet for Safari and Chrome, as well as direct integration into ScribeFire.

You can get it from our Zemanta Download Page

Step 2: Give Zemanta a try

To see Zemanta in action you should just start composing a new blog post or an email. Zemanta will be displayed at the right-hand side of the writing area.

Step 3: Personalize Zemanta

: Image by hernan.seoane via Flickr

Registering your copy of Zemanta, allows you to personalize recommendations we generate for you. Most notably:

you can tell us which blogs and RSS feeds to recommend you stories from
by connecting your Twitter, Facebook and MyBlogLog account, we’ll be able to recommend you links to your friends home-pages and profile as well as show you their avatar picture
connecting your Flickr account will mean that we’ll also search your Flickr photos
Amazon affiliate ID allows you to earn money from your blog

You can also specify the way Zemanta creates HTML for you, image alignment and behavior of additional components like pretty image attribution and more related articles.

Step 4: Become a power user

Read our tutorials to learn more about the power features and how we can further help with your blogging:

Tutorial: Zemanta bookmarklet for Google Chrome

How to: Use Zemanta to recommend articles from your own blog(s)

How to turn off Zemanta in GMail

How to make money by blogging with Zemanta

How to get your feed into Zemanta?

Supercharge your Social network blogging with Zemanta

Using Zemanta with Posterous

Zemanta now suggests ways to change the world

Zemanta adds over 500 wineblogger.info blogs for easy wine blogging

Zemanta is a good social media tool

Movie blogger? Zemanta makes your life easier!

Zemanta tip: Image align in Wordpress

The easiest way to blog about your favorite startup

Tutorial: 4 easy steps to great food blog with Zemanta

Case Study – Zemanta for Music Bloggers

Case Study – Zemanta for Book Bloggers

Looking for blog topic inspiration? Use Zemanta default picture!

Tutorial: using filter function with Zemanta

How to get your photo into Zemanta?

Multiple Images and Drag and Drop with Zemanta

Looking for blog inspiration? Zemanta popular!

Step 5: Become part of Zemanta

: Image by fs999 via Flickr

You can be part of our community in a few different ways:

You can send us your Blog URL and we’ll add it to global recommended articles index. Learn more
You can join our Friends of Zemanta mailing list, where we publish early previews of our upcoming features
You can also email us address of your blog where you use Zemanta, and we might pick you up for featured user blog post!
Help fellow users in our support forums at getsatisfaction
Write your review of Zemanta and tell a friend!

That’s it for a quick getting started guide. Leave a comment if you think we missed something or would like to see a more detailed blog post about.

Zemanta API: hover.in hoverlet

2009-06-19T16:39:54Z

One of the four major features of Zemanta’s contextual API is our related articles call, that allows you to query our database for most relevant articles and news post based on your content.

Hover.in is an innovative company in the field of publisher driven in-text Content & Ad delivery platform, that’s using this feature to provide related stories for given keywords. They’ve developed hover bubble’s (hoverlet) that can show you a variety of information pieces, one of them being Zemanta’s Related Articles.

To get a better sense of the service, try the demo, or take a look at their screencast:

Hover.in also plans on having a developer community and we can’t wait to see further mashups built on top of their hoverlets infrastructure and our API.

Tutorial: Zemanta bookmarklet for Google Chrome

2009-06-18T23:43:56Z

Google Chrome is gaining market share and we’re getting more and more requests for details on how to get our Zemanta Google Chrome Bookmarklet to work, as not everyone is familiar with how bookmarklets work.

1. To start, go to http://labs.zemanta.com/bookmarklet/ – and click on the Generate button:

2. Afterwards, grab the generate link and start dragging it:

3. Drop it into your Bookmarks bar, on top of Chrome window, just below the address bar.

4. That’s it. Now Compose a new blog post or email and Click Add Zemanta button.

There are a few things that you need to be careful about. “Add Zemanta” only works when you’re composing a blog post or email in one of our supported platforms. At the time of writing, these are: Wordpress.com and self-hosted Wordpress.org, Blogger, TypePad, MovableType, LiveJournal, Drupal, Ning, Tumblr, MySpace blogs, dotclear, GMail and new Yahoo! Mail.

Zemanta Bookmarklet works with Chrome 1 and Chrome 2 as well as Safari 4.

Featured blog: Three Wise Men

2009-06-17T21:18:32Z

David from Three Wise Men, was kind enough to tell us a bit about his experience with Zemanta at creating new blog:

After blogging for almost five years on my personal blog it was time to sail into new waters. Geek and Tech oriented blog, and since I invited two other fellow bloggers to help me with it, Three Wise Men were born. I used Zemanta Extension for Firefox before that and now I wanted to try Zemanta Wordpress plugin.

A few posts written with it and I must say that I was amazed with the results. Instant links, instant keywords and instant pictures. At last but not least, related articles. Probably the most important feature of them all.

I have to admit, that I was very lazy while writing blogs before and creating outgoing links was a rather painful experience. Write a post, select relevant keywords, google them, create links while copy pasting, rinse and repeate. Now, with Zemanta, this is usually piece of cake. Relevant links are updated on the fly as you type and you can include them in the end of your post. These links will also generate a pingback on linked site and expand your blog network. Pretty soon you start getting pingbacks from other Zemanta users which means that others find your blog posts with the help of Zemanta plugin and that those links can bring in some more traffic.

Writing content rich and informative blog post is quite a task sometimes and it can take you a lot of time. Zemanta shortens this time to a minimum, giving you more time to take care of the actual content.

Make sure to check their blog – Three Wise Men.

Would you like to have your blog featured here? Send email to jure@zemanta.com

Zemanta ltd.

API Showcase: New Faviki release

Release: New ReBlog

Featured user: Marshal Sandler

Zemanta as part of Lifestreaming workflow

API showcase: Linked Galaxy

Related articles by Zemanta

Vote for Zemanta in Techcrunch Europas awards

Related articles by Zemanta

Tutorial: Getting Started with Zemanta

Zemanta API: hover.in hoverlet

Tutorial: Zemanta bookmarklet for Google Chrome

Featured blog: Three Wise Men