2007 was a good year for Zemanta. We are eagerly waiting to see what we can do to make 2008 even better (and fun!).

A quick update: In last few days we moved to new offices and also rebuilt one of the sub-services so the whole system is now more reliable. Now demo beta accounts work again. I’d like to apologize to those who tried to use them but failed.

Well, we’d like wish you happy and successful year 2008! See you there!

Reading Clive Thompsons article in Decembers Wired about how everyone is a micro-celebrity with their own blog, Facebook profile and life stream of twitter twits and flickr images, I reflected on my own experience. Meeting a lot of friends around christmas festivities we of course chat about what was happening in the past year, yet this year was different. Since I started posting on my blog/twitter/flickr a bit more often recently I’ve started hearing interesting replies on my conversations openers. Mostly it is something along the lines: ”I know, I’ve seen it on your blog.”

Writing a personal blog is thus very similar to having your very own tabloid  with small but tasty details of your life. Depending on what type of person you are, you might enjoy this fact or become shocked that people know much more about you than you expected. Most likely they also talk to each other about things you lifecasted.

But talking about other people in your personal tabloid is hard right now. This is why our plugin has capability to recommend stories and links to other people, so it is much easier for you to connect special sections (trackbacks) of your upcoming editorials. 

Conferences are usually busy places with lots of conference rooms and little place for attendees to mingle. It was really refreshing to see a large part of Le Web 3 venue reserved for ones that wanted to discuss their big ideas and show their products more comfortably. There is definitely something special in demoing while sitting in bean bags. Especially if wi-fi “just works” in a positive way and coffee never runs out.

In last three months we went to a number of conferences and made lots of different friends and gave out heaps of business cards. It meant a lot to us to be able to finally show to everyone what we built in a cozy environment without the usual conference stress.

We are wrapping up our London experience and going to Le Web 3 in Paris next week! If you would like to meet us there, please drop me a mail!

We are quite excited about Le Web since everyone is saying how good it was last year. We are presenting there also.

In other news after countless issues we finally moved our private beta service to a hosted server, out of our living room. Hopefully we’ll open up our web page a little bit more later today.

See you at LeWeb3!

Related articles by Zemanta:

• Seedcamp goes to Paris with LeWeb3 [blog.seedcamp.com]
• Le Next week: LeWeb3 and Led Zepplin [pulverblog.pulver.com]]

Yesterday we presented our demo at Mashup demo 2 event. It was really rewarding to hear all the comments afterwards. Many sites were interested in using our technology. The second very exciting part is seeing what interesting things other companies are doing.

I’ll mention two. Blinkbox allows users to take a clip of well known movies, add a little bit of intro and send them to friends. It seems that the most amazing thing they’ve done is that they actually convinced (part of) Hollywood to go along! Finally! I’d just wish they’d start using some other term instead of “creative commons”, since they don’t mean Creative Commons.

Second one is Skimbit which is a site for “social decision making”. It should resonate with female audience. I have to say that Allicia (it’s founder) is amazing when presenting.

photo by Makoto Inoue

We’ve been discussing Dopplr over dinner and discovered lot’s of functionalities we miss. Dopplr is a great service, or at least, we all imagine how gret it will be, when it is feature complete. I personally miss an option of broadcasting my travel plans to anyone, not just those who know me. For me, this inability kills the core value proposition of helping me meeting with people when traveling.

I am sure the guys are working on it and that they will figure out the best way to do it. It is interesting, that the good ideas shine trough that imperfections of early stage implementation, and that the users are happy to suffer annoyances, as long as the core is improving.

Related to this, I have received an interesting test user review of our service today. It was from a well established blogger, whose opinion I respect a lot. He said, that he likes the concept, but is missing this and that functionality. A typical user response, when faced with a product that is not feature complete yet. He knew very well that the product won’t be feature complete, and wanted early access exactly because he wanted to help steer it.

I am very happy he suggested all the improvements, we have allready planned. It seems we are in snc with expectations.

Related articles by Zemanta:

• Dopplr Offsetr: Calculating Your Network’s Travel Impact [radar.oreilly.com]