Z-Blog

Working on a startup like Zemanta is full of interesting insights around technology, social media and industry in general. On one hand you have to worry about cutting edge developments while still trying to figure out how to address large enough audience for the whole development to make sense.

We try to share as much of these insights as we can with hopes that it’s going to help other startups and entrepreneurs around us.

If you would like to see us speak at next years SXSW Interactive 2010, please vote for our talk proposals:

• “Semantics vs. Simplicity” in End-User Web Apps

  After cleaning up interfaces and adding whitespace, the next step in making applications even more simple to use has to be to introduce magic. Adding features that track user behaviour, adapt to their styles, learn from their actions, and guess what should be in their minds right now, will be necessary in order to get even our grandparents using email and the web.

• Getting Bloggers to Engage with Your Brand

  In May ‘09 Zemanta gave $6000 USD to the five charities that our community of bloggers wrote about the most. Zemanta’s “Blogging For A Cause” campaign, raised awareness of worthy causes and Zemanta’s social vision. The session will present the techniques used to increase bloggers’ participation, as well as practical lessons learned when running a campaign across the whole blogosphere.

• Semantic Tagging and Blogging

  How can bloggers and social media websites take benefit of the rise of the Semantic Web? Efforts such as CommonTag and Rich Snippets are offering bloggers new options to add semantics to their blogs. This panel will discuss how bloggers and social media sites can leverage semantic tagging for their benefit.

• Tame Your Content! (Using Text Understanding APIs)

  Do you have your content tamed? How semantic APIs can be used by sites to get better insights into their content, do better repurposing and even make users happier by doing magic for them.