At Web 2.0 Expo Berlin I bumped into Andraž Tori, co-founder of Slovenian startup Zemanta. There here told me about Zemanta’s service: A plugin (for Firefox, or alternatively for several blogging platforms) that supports semantic blogging. Sounds trivial? It isn’t at all. Semantic blogging is great for both bloggers and the internet as a whole. Since then my life has been somewhat hectic, and as days passed I had it all in the back of my head, but never got around to trying out Zemanta.
For the web it means that the information is handled more orderly, and thereby becomes richer. If a service can figure out by itself that this file is a picture, taken at location X at time Y, you can build all kinds of cool things around those pieces of meta data.
For bloggers it means, as I’m experiencing while typing this post, some really helpful, easy-to-use extra features. More concretely – and I’m writing this as I’m looking at the Firefox plugin – I’m offered some images (like the one of Andraž and the company logo above) in a sidebar inside my WordPress. (Note: The image inserts look sort of code-heavy (lots of divs and stuff), apart from that it seems to be working a charm. Dragging and dropping the image seems to be a simple work-around here.)
Also, I’m offered “additional articles”, links from all over the web that seem to be relevant. With every semantically described post more data should become available here.
Some of the links offered to me for this post while writing it:
Related articles by Zemanta
Again, in my editor the links get inserted somewhat awkwardly, but overall it works fine. Just make sure you know your WordPress. Below the textfield I’m offered all kinds of links to drag and drop. (I just inserted that last link because I was offered to. How cool is that?)
All in all, this looks really powerful, even though it might be somewhat overwhelming for
Images: Zemanta logo and photo of Andraž via CrunchBase.
