Z-Blog

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!

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.

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”.

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.

Related articles by Zemanta

• 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)

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!

Related articles by Zemanta

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

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

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

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.