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Exactly a year ago, Andraz and I were sitting in a cafe by the river, pondering whether we dare to test the limits of our imagination and apply for this unknown but strangely familiar beauty contest we found online. They were looking for the next Google they said, but didn’t mind if it had very rough edges. Perhaps most importantly, they were offering a lot of help and asked only the most important questions.

So we took it. Spent the next two weeks polishing the application and couldn’t sleep the night before first selection. We had no idea what was waiting for us out there, but it felt right. At that particular moment, all we had was our imagination, a prototype and courage, to close our eyes and make the first step. It turned out to be a firm one, and on the next one we were not alone anymore.

Seedcamp has helped us to focus, to steer, to experience this new world and most important, it validated our ideas. This year, we are proud to be part of Seedcamp week again, this time on the other side, encouraging new generation of killer startups in London.

So as a message to all entrepreneurs who are considering boosting their business efforts, YES, you should apply and give your best effort to stand for your ideas. Everything else will be easier.

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At recent event podcamp Boston 3, Nathan Burke and Ken Gellman, gave a presentation on Discovery- How People Find Blogs, Video and Podcasts They Love & What That Means To You. It’s a great talk on how to promote your blog through different medium, and what do to to get yourself found.

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First tip in presentation how to get your content in front of audience is about Zemanta. It’s has really impressive title - Super Dope Ill Ninja Secret Trick. The gist of idea is that besides general Zemanta suggestions, we also help in creating relevant trackbacks. When you include links to suggested articles those blogs are pinged. Then depending on the configuration of blog on the other side, reverse link might show up in their trackbacks, and in turn generating traffic and exposure for your blog.

In the audio recoding, the audience asked a few questions, which I’d like to answer.

1. How far back do Zemanta suggestions go?
   -> We started aggregating first blog posts in September 2007, so this makes about 11 months in the past.
2. Does Zemanta crawl the web? How does it find blogs?
   -> Right now we aggregate, as opposed to crawl. This means that we don’t search whole internet as traditional search engines, but follow a collection of blogs. These blogs are mostly handpicked from the best sources on the Internet, and blogs of our users.
3. How does Zemanta make recommendations?
   -> In short: we look at the body of the text, extract main concepts and then find relevant suggestions for them.

Take a look at full blog post at BlogString, and don’t forget to listen to embedded podcast at the end as it has lots of answers to the questions from the audience.

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We are glad we will be able to participate this year’s Defrag conference in Denver, Colorado in November with the subtitle “The implicit web and more”. I’ll be talking about “Finding Serendipitous Information Through Context”. Hoping to bring some insights about how computers are figuring out what’s on our personal and collective minds and how they might provide us with stuff we don’t quite expect, but still helps or entertains us.

We also got discount code/coupon for all our friends that would like to get 100$ off for early bird registration. Use discount code “at1″ at DefragCon registration site (actually just click on the link, promotional voucher code is already included).

We heard many good things about Defrag 2007 conference, so we don’t have any doubts Defrag 2008 is going to be even better. See you there!

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Image by *extralab via Flickr

Zemanta extensions and plugins have stoped working two hours ago. We apologize to all our users and ask for patience. Since we believe in transparency, here’s the explanation:

Amazon is a company best known for their online bookstore, but in the world of web their most prominent offering is “infrastructure as a service”. It consists of Simple Storage Solution (S3) for serving static files, Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) for running programs and some other interesting services.

Amazon’s web services are very economic offering for startups like ours. Unfortunately that also means that when their service has problems, several other services are affected. Today there have been serious problems with S3 which among other things caused Zemanta plugins to stop working.

Zemanta uses S3 for two main purposes: distributing javascript code which renders interface for our graphical user interface and serving small icons at the bottom of each zemified post. Since S3 stopped working our graphical interface cannot be loaded when you write your blog. Our backend service works without flaws so our partners using web API are not affected.

Since roll-out infrastructure itself is affected we cannot independently provide a fix. We would like to apologize to our users and will try to prevent such points of failure in the future. Please bear with us until Amazon fixes their service which should be very soon since there are many services affected.

UPDATE (0:30 GMT): According to Amazon Web services status page some users should already have Zemanta back and working again. Others will have to wait a bit more.

UPDATE: Service now works again.

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7571 is quite an interesting number. It’s not prime number, but those are overrated anyway;it appears to be one of the numbers that match:

a(0)=1, a(n)=9*n^2 + 2, n >= 1(from The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences)

It’s a product of primes 67 and 113, which are even more interesting.

But anyway, to us, this is the Mozilla add-ons ID assigned to Zemanta, that is now available trough their directory of the best Mozilla extensions. A big thanks to Briks who helped us develop it, and to all our dear users who tried it before, wrote about it and thus helped speed up the inclusion.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7571

We’ll be also happy of any reviews you add to the add-ons page.

A few short months after our first initial release to public, we bring you next early preview. This time of our API access. For those who don’t know what API means - it’s Application Programmable Interface and it allows application developers to use our contextual matching suggestion technology in their own applications.

Our API allows you to use simple RESTful interface to get suggested Images, Articles, Tags and Links in a structured format (XML, JSON, ..) for a given piece of text. To get access just navigate to http://developer.zemanta.com and sign-up. We have libraries and code snippets for all the major language prepared.

If all this is not something you’re interested in, but would love to see Zemanta in your application, just ask author of that application to visit http://developer.zemanta.com and get in touch with us.

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