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. 

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?

Yesterday I was fixing HTML and CSS problems on this blog, including missing blogroll, bad IE layout and horribly incorrect use of heading tags.

I really felt like i am back in the middle of the 90′. My feeling is that WordPress really hasn’t brought us much further. I am still waiting for someone to offer an ‘Apple experience’ for customizing the blog.

While working on markup I’ve also checked how well our technology works on our previous posts. Even though Jure insisted blogposts should never be retroactively changed, I couldn’t resist. The experience of spicing up blog posts with just a few clicks was too addictive.

Related articles by Zemanta:

• Disable Bad HTML [stylegala.com]
• 5 Simple Steps to Kickstarting a Blog [johnchow.com]