At recent event podcamp Boston 3, Nathan Burke and Ken Gellman, gave a presentation on Discovery- How People Find Blogs, Video and Podcasts They Love & What That Means To You. It’s a great talk on how to promote your blog through different medium, and what do to to get yourself found.

Image via Wikipedia

First tip in presentation how to get your content in front of audience is about Zemanta. It’s has really impressive title - Super Dope Ill Ninja Secret Trick. The gist of idea is that besides general Zemanta suggestions, we also help in creating relevant trackbacks. When you include links to suggested articles those blogs are pinged. Then depending on the configuration of blog on the other side, reverse link might show up in their trackbacks, and in turn generating traffic and exposure for your blog.

In the audio recoding, the audience asked a few questions, which I’d like to answer.

1. How far back do Zemanta suggestions go?
   -> We started aggregating first blog posts in September 2007, so this makes about 11 months in the past.
2. Does Zemanta crawl the web? How does it find blogs?
   -> Right now we aggregate, as opposed to crawl. This means that we don’t search whole internet as traditional search engines, but follow a collection of blogs. These blogs are mostly handpicked from the best sources on the Internet, and blogs of our users.
3. How does Zemanta make recommendations?
   -> In short: we look at the body of the text, extract main concepts and then find relevant suggestions for them.

Take a look at full blog post at BlogString, and don’t forget to listen to embedded podcast at the end as it has lots of answers to the questions from the audience.

Related articles by Zemanta

• My Blogging Workflow: Thoughts From My Podcamp Boston 3 Presentation
• Podcamp 3 Boston Panel: Discovery- How People Find Blogs, Video and Podcasts They Love & What That Means To You

While not designing new features for Zemanta, Boštjan also takes time to talk to journalists and bloggers and answer the questions they have.

This week I’d like to highlight two recent interviews:

First one was conducted by Laura Oliver at journalism.co.uk, one of the essential sites for journalists. The conversation itself also focus on benefits for journalists.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
To publish content online today means: after you write your story, you still need to add links and images, and tag it properly.
Your readers expect rich content, next generation semantic web applications require it, and we want to make it simple and fun to produce this high quality web content.
Our service utilises the power of advanced machine-learning and natural language processing algorithms, so that you don’t have to do repetitive tasks and can just be creative.

Read the whole interview at journalism.co.uk.

The second interview was done by Raanan Bar-Cohen, at Publisher Blog, that is featuring tips and tools that help publishers author with Wordpress. They talked about recently released Wordpress plugin and why it helps publishers.

Why should bloggers use the Zemanta WordPress plugin?
It’s painless, it’s pleasant, it takes most the friction out of creating the content. The question is, why would anyone not use it?

Read the whole interview at publisherblog.automattic.com.

Today we’re starting with a new series of posts, featuring interviews with our users. First one is LiveCrunch.

What blogs are you writing and can you describe them?
I write about technology on LiveCrunch.com and my other blog is Bontb.com which I help other bloggers generate income stream to their blogs.

How is Zemanta helping you blog? What features do you like most?
I have been using zemanta since they got out and its helping me to find related articles where before I had to search for them. I know there are some wordpress plugins but to be honest Zemanta gives me more options and I got to chose what link I want to publish. Zemanta also helped me a lot build backlinks, since I started using Zemanta I had at least 80 sources backlinking to each of my blogs.
I like related articles and tags feature the most.

What would you like to see in the future from Zemanta?
I would love to see Zemanta using more image sources. I also would like Zemanta to incorporate videos from sites like youtube, veoh etc.

Having a Browser Add-On as a way to extend blogs is certainly a novell idea that helped many of our users try Zemanta easily and use it without having to worry about lots of technical details usually involved in trying new plugins for blogs. But for more mobile bloggers who blog from different computers and multiple-user blogs, it quickly became obvious that we also need proper plugins.

Last week we announced full support for MovableType 4.1 in form of plugin (and also extension), that our friends at Six Apart now feature as the featured plugins. If you blog from MovableType, you should download it from MovableType Plugin Directory and give it a try..

Source: Wikipediadisclaimer: writing @1am in the middle of zemanta launch ater party surrounded by lots of orange t-shirts and quality slovenian wines and beer.

WE ARE PUBLIC!!!

for 9 hours already, and Amazon still didn-t break. go figure. Mashery works perfect also! Web site is still online. Extension still installs without a flaw.

Sounds ghastly, doesn’t it?

on a side note, wii refuses to cooperate and salsa dancers all left half an hour ago.

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?