As you might know, Zemanta is taking part in a Seedcamp process. Which means some initial funding and three months of work in London. Yesterday Seedcamp semi-officially ended in an event called “investors day” where all 6 teams/companies presented what we have done in last months and how we plan to take over the world in the future (starting with our respective markets).

It was quite astonishing how far all of us got since the beginning of September. Presentations were naturally all polished up, but more importantly we knew much better what we are actually talking about. At this point I’d really like to thank Reshma, Saul, all the mentors, investors and rest of the Seedcamp crowd for providing us with this great opportunity to learn, develop and progress.

With new gained experience we are now far better equipped to explore what lies ahead of us.

Related articles by Zemanta:

• 52 hours left to apply for Seedcamp [localglobe.blogspot.com]
• More Events and Seedcamp on the Road [blog.seedcamp.com]

The Spanish Blogging Conference turned out to be a truly great event. Until now we were mostly talking to bloggers who mainly write in English or Slovenian, so being able to speak to a new group of bloggers underlined quite a few of our ideas and showed us where our focus should be. Most specially by supporting local languages and communities and that blogs are a communication tool.

Every group has their own ways of using and living through new technologies, it is also quite remarkable how Spanish bloggers are similar to their Blogging peers in other countries - they don’t care that much about the technology and how it is called, as long as it allows them to get their message to their readers. Having great tools that make it easy is a plus, but as Twitter demonstrated, even 160 characters is enough to do some amazing things.

While Zemanta does not (yet) official support Spanish, I am sure that passion and determination presented will help us greatly when we weight which language to select next.

Special thanks go to Christian, who by doing small pieces of his magic enabled us to be there.

* Photo by ABACERIA DEL SUR

I’ve just got a message from Uroš saying that we won the EuroPrix TopTalent Award in the category of Content Tools & Interface Design! We applied with Odprti kop solution which we did for Slovenian national television just before founding Zemanta.

It is an award for the most innovative projects in European media space for young professionals. Gašper and Uroš were present at the gala ceremony. Photos are coming soon.

Also yesterday was exactly 6 months since Zemanta was launched! A nice gift indeed.

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• Natural language processing fun [zemanta.com]
• Pick any two [zemanta.com]

How do you test a complex system that is trying to mimic being smart?

You want to automate testing, so you have your quality meter available for every little change you make. While having unit tests helps catching classical programming regressions, the major part of the challenge is having ’smart part’ under control. Unfortunately the only way to tell if the system is doing a good job or not is to have human check the results. The trick is that if you could automate testing in general, you would already have solved the hardest problem.So what you basically do is generate a set of evaluation data, manually. And have a system that does something like unit tests, but instead of giving you fail/pass results, you get statistics. Now you would think that the problem is solved, but that’s far away from truth.

There is changing of the dataset - when you have new content in the system, you get completely new related stories and you have to go back and have a human judge them. There is expansion of the evaluation data - as you add new tests you generally can’t send them through previous versions of your algorithms, since that would be prohibitely expansive. And there is statistics that hardly gives you overview over what exactly your changes caused, just few final numbers. And then there is the problem of pipelining the processing. Even if you improve the first stage, end results might be worse, since you’ve already adapted the second stage to previous first one. So you need to actually evaluate each part of the system in isolation and then together.

At the end you actually find out that you spend disproportional amount of time evaluating even the smallest changes. So you are in danger to just skip that evaluation which naturally you shouldn’t.

Ok, so much for today, now I think the evaluation run has just ended and I should be checking the results, again.

Related articles by Zemanta:

• Opinion: Succeeding through failure [computerworld.com]
• Dave Neary: Testing frameworks [blogs.gnome.org]
• Designing software for testability [regdeveloper.co.uk]

How can you tell the difference between articles of big media and blogs?

Large majority of old-media that moved to internet has a very strict rules that they should never ever link to sites outside their conglomerate. If by some coincidence they do, they put all the links at the end of the article and make them as unnoticeable as possible.

The official line is that they are afraid to be held responsible for accuracy of the content they link to. The true reason is that either newspapers and TV-derived sites are trying to prevent their readers leaving or their journalistic staff simply hasn’t caught up with the meaning of the web yet.

I’ve seen a lot of both. From my time at RTV Slovenia I can tell that a lot of journalists (with exceptions!) haven’t grasped the idea of a reader/viewer being able to do basic research on their own. This is somehow excusable, big cultures are slow to absorb new concepts. There is not much that can be done (except waiting). However the first excuse - being afraid of losing readers - is really just an unexcusable strategic mistake.

Not providing to the audience direct links to referenced and relevant documents is actually a missed opportunity to fulfill the real need of curiosity. Missed opportunity to be user’s starting point of inquiry into any topic.

And then media companies complain how search engines are capturing all the users by leveraging other’s people content. Well, it is the media companies that are refusing to be the user’s home base which he can actually leave to explore the wilderness.

Related articles by Zemanta:

• Why the Newspapers Still Don’t Get It - re:Linking [centernetworks.com]
• The Future of the Social Media Release is in Your Hands [briansolis.com]
• Alexandre Prokoudine: Five golden rules for a journalist [prokoudine.info]
• One quick note on Frank Rich [dailykos.com]

This weekend Jure (a.k.a. the interface guy) is going to a Evento Blog Espana. He’s going to talk with spanish bloggers and gather some feedback from non-english speakers. If you [dear reader] also happen to be there, leave him a note, he might be in a mood for showing the alpha (jure at zemanta dot com).

Also he just updated me on the buzzwords we should be using when addressing tech community. So here it goes: we are BJAX!

All those nasty things we are doing with Firefox extension actually have their own name! BJAX means Browser Extensions and AJAX. The plugin does the following: when the page just loaded is identified as a “create new post” it injects a bunch of javascript that provides all the Zemanta functionality, plus some dirty details. This means people will be able to have Zemanta experience even when blogging on hosted platforms.

Isn’t that great?