Z-Blog

New release: My Friends, My Flickr and Filter

Posted by jure, under firstpage, zemanta on September 18th, 2008

Today we are releasing top three most requested features as a major upgrade to the Zemanta service, bringing it to the next stage – making it personal.

Showing Social Fetaures of Zemanta
  • My Friends & Feeds- ability to include your friends and custom feeds to your Zemanta account
  • My Flickr – we will now also find pictures in your Flickr account
  • Filter – you can filter recommendations to more fine grain the results to your content

These features are making Zemanta your own personal assistant when looking for inspiration, researching the topic, or actually writing your story.

My Friends and Flickr integration

You can now connect you Zemanta account with your FaceBook, MyBlogLog and Twitter account. We’ll aggregate your contacts and later recommend links to their profiles and avatar pictures, when you mention their names in your blog post.

When we find links to your friends, we’ll show their profile picture in the gallery, as well as a link recommendation. If we can find feeds of their blogs, as indicated in their profile settings, we’ll also search through them when preparing recommendations.

Links with selected friends from my social networks

Links with selected friends from my social networks

If you specify your Flickr account, we’ll also try to search through your Flickr images. Searches of your Flickr image collection is not limited by copyright license, so we’ll show all public images.

Zemanta gallery showing pictures of my friends and personal Flickr images

Zemanta gallery showing pictures of my friends and personal Flickr images

My Feeds

You can now upload OPML file from your feed reader and get recommendation from sources you are regularly reading or that you trust the most. Think of it as Techmeme meets your feed reader in your dashboard.

List or articles indicating my friends sources

Filter your results

Filter feature allows you to specify the terms you want Zemanta to more focus on. This enables you to more control the bias of returned results. This is also a great way to locate your Flickr images, if you enabled your Flickr account.

Filter recommendations in Zemanta

Filter recommendations in Zemanta

Overall improvements

Besides these novelties we are improving the overall look and feel:

  • New light-weight widget design
  • You can now finally include multiple images trough an intuitive drag and drop interface
  • Date- and Topic- based browsing trough Popular
  • supported new platform DotClear and Rotten Tomatoes movies database

We also invested a lot of effort in improving all the clients, so you should update when your favorite platform prompts you for upgrade.

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  • Looks nice - thanks for the updates :)
  • That does look cool! Thanks for the updates guys. You make wonderful things.

    TTYL.
  • Sounds great! But you'll need to update the WLW plugin before I can see any of these updates, since the public beta just released doesn't like the current version of the plugin.
  • Awesome. Nice additions guys. I have been using zemanta for nearly 4 months now and always look forward to upgrades from you guys.

    Keep up the good work
  • Great! Thanks!
  • jure
    @chris: thanks for the notice. We'll look into adding support for the newest beta.
  • Mike
    Seems like this update doesn't place images as well in Wordpress blogs. The previous version did.

    I'm using the Firefox plugin, FF 3.0.1, Wordpress 2.6. You can see the results at http://www.avantmusicnews.com

    The most recent post puts the text below and to the left of the image, but using the previous version of Zemanta on the rest of the posts on the site, the images and text are next to one another.
  • Great new update. I love it. I've found out how to add new blog sources but haven't seen how to add new friends in. Can you expand on that?
  • With the new update nothing seems to be working - no new articles are being suggested at all - is this a bug or am I missing something.
  • fry
    Thanks for the kind words on the update. If something isn't working please give us some more information so we can try to reproduce the bug and fix it - blogging platform, browser, are you using the extension or the browser, do you have any more extensions installed. You can also check getsatisfaction.com/zemanta and open a case there.
  • Nothing working with wordpress 2.6.1 no tags links or pictures even tho I signed in and logged on and set preferences
  • I have the Zemanta extension installed and I don't seem to be able to log in properly. I've logged in on the preferences page but when I click 'save & close' the Zemanta sidebar still says 'log in & add friends".
    I've tried closing the window and re-opening it, restarting Firefox and starting a new post but nothing seems to work.
  • Brilliant! I've been using Zemanta for quite a while now, and these latest updates just make it all the more useful! Keep up the great work!
  • Cool, but now it won't let me log in or send details as it no longer recognizes my email address.
  • Great improvement, thanks
  • Great kit! Have had a few problems which I have listed in my blog. Marko and Jure were brilliant at helping so will feed back any bugs.
    Cheers
  • Wow - this update sounds fabulous - can't wait to test all the new functionality - and I have a lot of blog posts to write today!
  • Wonderful!

    Thanks a lot
  • Yay! I was about to give up on Zemanta. I was getting frustrated. I hope things get better with this upgrade. Love the idea of Z, but was not liking the implementation.
  • Whoa. Nice update! - looks great, good work.
  • For me Zemanta has revolutionized the way I do blog posts. Wonderful product - thank you. 1 would enhance one aspect a tiny bit further... when I get a gallery of images to pick from sometimes I would like to actually look at more selections or reset the search criteria on those images somehow. Cheers - and thanks again !!
  • I was still having trouble since the upgrade - I had to delete the old plugin and install the new one to get Zemanta to work.
  • I love zemanta and any new updates just makes my day.
    Thanks
  • F I Ramirez
    Thank you! I am a new user but have found it incredibly helpful.
  • Really a nice innovation that will surely help bloggers get stuff on their sites.
  • andraz
  • Thanks for the information. This is my first time stumbling into your resource. Will check it out! Again thanks.
  • i like flickr thanks for adding the option, it is great to surf your website if every option is there.
  • Sometimes I seem to need to trip over something before I recognize it's value. I heard about Zemanta when searching for content for my relationship blog, but didn't fully grasp the power of it.

    My error! I've just used it to add to my blog's content and to send a Mothers Day greeting (with image - which is almost impossible without Zemanta) in Gmail.

    A superb utility. A virtual assistant that will save me considerable time and further increase the value of my blog..
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