Zemanta ltd.

Happy birthday Firefox!

2009-11-09T21:31:36Z

: Image via Wikipedia

5 years ago, web browsing got smarter, easier to use and more open with the release of the Firefox web browser. Today, with over one billion downloads, and countless extensions developed, Firefox holds the place of being the second most used browser on the web, controlling 25% of audience share with its focus on security, performance and flexibility.

Firefox has come quite a long way in just a short period of time online. Voted as PC world’s product of the year in 2005, acclaimed as Forbes.com best browser in 2004 and the winner of Cnets’s Battle of the Browser in 2008, they have revolutionized the way we view the internet. And with their latest 3.5.5 release, Firefox shows no signs of slowing down.

A half a decade later, Firefox has made it possible for services such as our own, to reach audiences all over the world. And with their attention to the developer community, have paved the road for other browsers such as Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari to become more developer friendly, open and safe.

Join us while we celebrate Firefox by lighting the world on fire. Congrats to Mozilla’s Firefox team on 5 great years! And I cant wait to see whats next!

Happy 5th Birthday Firefox! (sitepoint.com)
Five essential addons for new Firefox users (Happy fifth birthday, Firefox!) (downloadsquad.com)
Firefox 3.6 and 3.7 Release Schedule Confirmed (techie-buzz.com)

What’s up Buttercup?

2009-11-20T00:43:16Z

Wow! It has been a crazy last couple of weeks! First the big news about MovableType, and then next thing you know it was off to Las Vegas! Forgive me, but in all the commotion I do not believe we have officially met. Heya! My name is Tilly McLain, and I am the new Social Media Butterfly/Community Manager over here at Zemanta!

photographer credit: flickr.com/jdlasica

How about I tell you a little bit about myself! I grew up in Portland Oregon, and after moving here to beautiful San Francisco over a year ago, I really couldn’t imagine living anywhere else! When I’m not at a karaoke bar, or playing videogames, I spend most of my time online hanging out with you guys! I am a huge Tumblr fangirl, and am never more than arms reach of my Android phone.

It is an honor to be officially be on board! I come to the team with a huge love for the blogging community. Dating back to my days on LiveJournal, all the way up to my most recent gig over at Yahoo, working as community manager for MyBlogLog. And after admiring the Zemanta team from afar, I couldn’t be more excited to be a part of the magic!

I look forward to getting to know everyone! You can find me hanging out in the GetSatisfaction channel, or directly at tilly (at) zemanta dot com. Drop me a line anytime, just to say hi I cant wait to meet everybody!

xoxo
Tilly McLain
(@misstillytilly)

Goodbye BlogWorld, Hello Web 2.0 Summit! (zemanta.com)

Goodbye BlogWorld, Hello Web 2.0 Summit!

2009-10-20T14:23:34Z

What’s up Buttercup!

Man oh man, what a week! And its only getting started! Hot off the tails of an awesome trip to Las Vegas for BlogWorld expo, the Zemanta team is heading to the Mashery lounge for the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco!

Zemanta BlogWorld crew, tilly is behind the camera

Wow! BlogWorld expo was huge this year! Thank you to everybody that came by the booth to visit! It was amazing to talk to everyone! I can’t believe how busy we were! Never a dull moment. I would also like to take a moment to recognize that a lot goes into preparing for an event like this, and I would like to congratulate everyone for an amazing job well done!

: Image via CrunchBase

Didn’t get a chance to see us at Blogworld? If you are in San Francisco this week, swing by the Mashery Lounge at the Web 2.0 Summit and come say hi!

xoxo

Hello From Las Vegas (davidrisley.com)
Ever Been on a Blog That Was Laid Out Like Las Vegas (successful-blog.com)
Las Vegas or Bust! (zemanta.com)

Las Vegas or Bust!

2009-10-14T04:40:31Z

The Zemanta gang is heading to fantastic Las Vegas Nevada, for the BlogWorld/New Media ‘09 expo this weekend!

Are you gonna be there too? Make sure to swing by and visit us at booth #416 where you can get a chance to meet the team behind the magic, ask any questions about the voodoo that we do so well, and score some Zemanta goodies!

Come say hi to myself, Andraz, Jim & Ales to get a personal, hands on demo with features and improvements we have been working so hard on, and maybe even a sneak peak behind the scenes on some of the awesome things we have in store!

I know I am very excited, what about you? It sounds like this year is gonna be huge! Who all is planning on making the trip? Can’t wait to see ya there!

xoxo

Let MailChimp Send You to Blogworld (mailchimp.com)
Social Media, BlogWorld and a Weekend in Las Vegas. (newcommbiz.com)

Making its debut to the iPhone app store, allow me to introduce Broadersheet!

2009-10-13T00:41:12Z

There’s nothing we love more here at the Zemanta HQ, then when the internet does the work for us. Its no secret that our main focus has always been to make your life easier. This is why a certain iPhone app by the name of Broadersheet peeked our interest!

We are living in a digital age, where most of our news and stories come from on-line sources. With so many interesting articles streaming by, sometimes its hard to keep up with the stories that match your interests. Life is noisey, Broadersheet can help you cut out the chatter.

As you use Broadersheet to keep up on all your favorite RSS feeds, it starts to learn more about who you are, and what you’re interested in, and suggests related stories that you may never have noticed through all the clutter! And it uses Zemanta’s text understanding technology (via API) to get a hold of what the stories are about!

What different RSS readers are you currently using on your iPhone? What are the pros or cons? Any features you would like to see Broadersheets add to their application? Discuss it below in the comments section, we would love to hear your feedback!

New Zemanta engine & API release

2009-10-07T12:19:42Z

Image via Wikipedia

Earlier today we quietly rolled out a new version of the Zemanta engine and API!

The Zemanta engine is responsible for analyzing whatever you write and producing suggestions that are delivered to your blogging dashboard. As with every new release, we have improved accuracy (especially of in-text links) and slightly improved speed.

More importantly we have added some functionality that third party developers have been requesting for some time now. New web API parameters allow you to get more entities and concepts for your text, more related articles, and more images. You can now also limit the age of the related articles (probably the single most requested feature).

Information about the new parameters is available on our developer portal. No matter if you use the API for term extraction, as a keywording engine, named entity extraction, or related news API, the results should be improved as of today!

Zemanta API: hover.in hoverlet (zemanta.com)
Is Zemanta your little blogging secret? (zemanta.com)
Making The Web Smarter (avc.com)

Same great Movable Type; now with a dash of Zemanta!

2009-09-30T12:55:32Z

Image via CrunchBase

We’re really excited to announce that our plug-in will ship with new versions of Movable Type! This means that by downloading the new Movable Type 4.32 (that’s the latest version), you get all the blogging goodness of Movable Type, but now with a dash of Zemanta baked right in by default! And the best part is that you dont have to do anything extra to enjoy the same Zemanta excellence that you love. It really couldn’t be easier! No extra plug-ins, no additional installations. Easy peasy lemon squeezy

I speak for the entire gang here when I say how excited we are about this partnership! It has always been our goal at Zemanta to make blogging easier & more fun, and we feel this level of integration is a step in that direction – and one we’d like to see more blogging platforms take! Hehe, I would be lying if I said that the gang here wasn’t over the moon with this news.

So what do you guys think! Sounds delicious right? What other blogging platforms would you like to see Zemanta integrated with? Is there anything that you would have done differently? Notice something acting wonky? We want to hear your feedback! Zemanta is only as strong as the people who contribute, and we are only happy if you are

Now what are you waiting for!? Head on over to Movable Type, upgrade to 4.32 and dive in! Hehe, the water feels perfect.

Download Movable Type

Zemanta – Faster, better & uncut

2009-09-24T14:31:19Z

Image by cloud_nine via Flickr

A few months ago we have started an exit survey to figure out why some people uninstall Zemanta Firefox extension (as inexplicable as it sounds to us, it does happen . To our surprise users were willing to share their view and help us improve Zemanta experience.

Substantial number of responders commented that Zemanta slows down their writing experience since it loads later than the rest of their blogging dashboard and even confuses them by springing into life after they already start to write.

We dug in and tried to figure out what is going on. We knew that we can’t load instantly due to the mechanics of extending the dashboard, but we were still astonished by what we found: Sometimes it took us a few seconds before we’d start loading and much more before we finished! So we devised the plan and went to work.

We discovered:

Zemanta was loading multiple javascript and CSS files from Amazon S3 hosting. It can easily take 200 to 300ms per file to be downloaded.
Fetch of user’s customized preferences from server took a second
Afterwards we did a search on Flickr for interesting initial photos which could also take from half a second to a second
And lastly we downloaded a file containing ‘inspirational articles’ that show up before you write any text.

We addressed all of the above. Now we are happy to report that Zemanta loads in 0.3 – 0.5 seconds. This should be negligible for most users. We spent first week of September on these optimizations and then released them one by one after they passed quality control. The last one was the upgrade of Firefox extension to version 0.6.2.

What did we do?

We merged all javascript files into one, and all CSS files into one
We moved hosting from Amazon S3 to Amazon CloudFront, the proper content distribution network – difference was amazing, now those files take 30ms to load
We implemented user-side caching of user preferences in both Firefox and Internet Explorer extensions. This reduces time to fetch preferences to zero after first load
We created central ‘defaults’ file that is updated every hour and holds both Flickr images list and related articles that are shown for inspiration before you start writing. Loading of this file is substantially faster than calling Flickr on every Zemanta load.

So all this delivered faster, better & uncut Zemanta to our bloggers! If you have issues that annoy you when using Zemanta, please do let us know! We are listening at support@zemanta.com!

New Zemanta Firefox extension – 0.6 (zemanta.com)
Speed up Firefox by cleaning out your SQLite databases (downloadsquad.com)
Vladimir Vukicevic: To Sprite Or Not To Sprite (vlad1.com)

Zemanta one of the top 100 tech media companies as selected by The Guardian

2009-09-07T09:31:33Z

: Image via Wikipedia

The Guardian announced today their list of The top 100 tech media companies that are picked for their innovation and creativity in the past year. We were picked as one of the companies to keep an eye on in Advertising and search space.

Thanks everyone for the support that you’ve showed for our work and we can’t wait to show you what we’ve worked on during the summer.

How to get Zemanta Balloons working (FAQ)

2009-09-08T13:45:54Z

We’ve received a few questions over Twitter on how to get Zemanta Balloons working, so a quick tutorial is in order.

0. Which platforms are supported?

At the moment Balloons require us to be able to insert a piece of JavaScript into your blog post to get it working. This works pretty reliably on: self-hosted Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad, MovableType and Drupal.

There are some platforms that don’t support our Balloons (and other advanced readside features): Wordpress.com, Gmail, Y!Mail and Windows Live Writer.

1. How do I insert a Balloon?

Idea behind Balloon’s is that it creates overlays for your readers, providing them with additional information, so they don’t have to leave your site if you link a term or a YouTube video.

At the moment, the only way to get Balloon into your blog is to apply one of the Zemanta recommended links that point to one of the supported resources: Wikipedia, YouTube or Google Maps.

2. Where can I see it?

To preview your Balloons open your blog post in Preview mode. If your blogging support doesn’t support previewing in a new window, you’ll have to wait until publish time until you’ll be able to see it.

3. Who can see the Balloons?

Balloons should be visible to all of your readers that have a browser released in a last few years and have JavaScript enabled. They will not be visible in your RSS/Atom feeds due to the fact that most readers ignore or even strip javascript from feeds.

4. How can I turn balloons on or off?

By default, the Balloons are turned on for now users and turned off for users that used Zemanta before August ‘09. To turn it on or off, open Preferences in lower-right corner of Zemanta widget, register/login and enable/disable More info balloons under Readers’ features.

Do note that these settings work per-post. So disabling or enabling it will not have affect on your previous posts. To apply the change to a previous post, just edit it, apply/deapply any Zemanta recommendation and save it. We’ll automatically update the Balloons setting for that post.

Do you have any other Balloons related questions? Let us know in the comments!

Using Zemanta with any blogging platform (zemanta.com)
Zemanta Launches Balloons (joedawsons.com)

Zemanta ltd.

Happy birthday Firefox!

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What’s up Buttercup?

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Las Vegas or Bust!

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New Zemanta engine & API release

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Same great Movable Type; now with a dash of Zemanta!

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Zemanta – Faster, better & uncut

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Zemanta one of the top 100 tech media companies as selected by The Guardian

How to get Zemanta Balloons working (FAQ)

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