Image via WikipediaYesterday Cyberpipe hosted Richard Rutter from Clearleft who had presentation on web typographies. Recently a journalist from one of the big press agencies was embedded with Zemanta while he tried to find out if Slovenia might be brewing new wave of web companies to take over the world. Today there is presentation at Jozef Stefan Institute by Neel Sundaresan, director of eBay Research Labs. Cycorp decided to open their European HQ in Ljubljana. There are weekly web crowd meetings “Spletne urice” plus endless stream of entrepreneurial events. Something is up, but it is hard to point out what.

Last week web.start conference albeit happening in Croatia was occupied by Slovenians. Not to mention there are rumors floating around that another Slovenian startup called Noovo is launching next week.

When talking with smart people from the States and Western Europe there is a sentiment brewing that next big thing might come from New Europe. Saying Ljubljana is becoming web-capital of Europe is naturally exaggerating by a wide margin, but the region as a whole might be hiding some very precious pearls.

Image via WikipediaActually we don’t know exactly how big we are, but we are in Portuguese Wikipedia. This is the first Wikipedia article about Zemanta that we know of (thank you Dasilvaorg whoever you are!)

Zemanta only supports English language for now, but people tend not to care about that too much. We are seeing a lot of Spanish and after that French and German sent to the system for processing. We are sorry, but currently we are not supporting those languages, so any good results you might get out of our system are a mere coincidence.

Image via WikipediaOn friday we had a pleasure to present Zemanta at Web.start conference in Zagreb.

What surprised me was the number of participants. There were 250 people there. Eventually I got the feeling that more Slovenian web companies were there than they are at Slovenian conferences.

The moto of the conference was venture capital in Southeastern Europe. Nothing new was said except for the honest truth that regional VCs like copycats. Copycats are a safe bet and easy to understand.

Zemanta on the other hand tries to do something really innovative. Something that hasn’t really been tried before. Our presentation was the last one, but I still managed to get people excited. Let’s see how many of them start to use Zemanta while blogging. How many times do you have to hear how good Zemanta is before you start using it?

Many of you have written to us asking for more images and articles. With today’s update we bring you exactly that. Now every ’suggestions refresh’ brings you more images and articles, together with history of suggestions throughout the post. Moreover when you hover over the images you now get a bigger image preview, together with description and license. This way deciding what picture you want in your blog is easier and without excessive clicking.

We also added LiveJournal to the list of supported blogging platforms. The experience is the same as on any other platform.

Full release notes:

• Image and articles browsing with history
• Improved tool-tips
• LiveJournal support
• Firefox Extension is now properly signed

Some of you wrote to us saying that Zemanta does not load for you sometimes so after a few quiet bugfix releases we think we finally found the bug and squashed it. The fix should make it more reliable on all of our platforms.

If you are still seeing a problem of orange box instead of whole post loading, please first clear your Firefox cache. If it still doesn’t work drop us a line at getsatisfaction.com/zemanta.

Full Wordpress 2.5 and new Wordpress.com support is one of the loudest request we got from you. Together with release of new Firefox 3 beta 5, they were such large changes that it warrants a new minor release. We actually rolled out our code last week, so you are already using latest Zemanta with support for all the new stuff.

Besides support for new platform and browser, we also made a couple of tweaks to our engine so it now supports even more links to resources other than Wikipedia. We also changed the drop-down default to non-wikipedia source when we can suggest such link.

The last change to our engine is the size of Blog index. In last few weeks we managed to triple our index of articles. We also started working on adding your blogs into our aggregator.

In short:

* WordPress 2.5 and new Wordpress.com support
* FireFox 3 Beta 5 support
* increased the number of suggestions to non-wikipedia sources