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The semantic web (lately being called web 3.0 among other buzzwords) is the future of our online networking. Boiled down, it's all about context. The new technologies that have been in development to better contextualize or networks and boost our interactivity are really starting to get awesome!
One of my favorite geek blogs, Read Write Web, posted a list of their Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008, so I thought I'd poke around in some of these and call out my favorite new cool toy.
Although Zemanta wasn't one RWW's particular faves, it was so highly rated by users that they felt compelled to include it. This, of course, piqued my interest, so I decided to give this semantic/contextual blogging tool a shot. I tried out the product in both Google's Blogger and in our very old version of Movable Type. In both cases, you actually download the handy little app as a Firefox extension. But, you ask, what does it actually do?
Well, once installed, a little window pops up (see picture at top of this post) and the user is given a scrolling palette of image choices to click on and automagically embed in his/her post. The photos are selected from Wikimedia Commons, flickr and wikipedia as well as other open-source websites to make terms active links.
Ultimately, I was hoping to see a magic button that would let me, say, highlight terms in my blog post, and it would then seek them out on the interwebs and insert the links. As it stands, I spend a bunch of time cruising my post and looking for web addresses to add links in my text manually. Zemanta does not do this for me, as it really focuses on wikipedia links and is still a little lacking in search sophistication. But, it is a very fun tool that takes almost no learning to use, and it is a great step towards awesome things to come!
Do you use contextual web tools? What is your favorite? Would you/do you use Zemanta? Why or why not?
ps- click on the little reblog link at the bottom of the post to see something really cool for cross posting and quoting!
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=f480f6fe-0fdf-4390-be1a-22cba9506f68)
To search manually for a certain word or a term, you can enter it into "filter" field that you get by clicking the filter "button" button. This will refocus all the results around your keyword.
Regarding Wikipedia links. We now index more then 12 different sources, so you shouldn't see many Wikipedia links. The case where you'll get that is when the text is abstract or we don't have anything better to show. The issue with most the databases is that they're limited in size, making them useful for their topics. We're working on resolving that by adding more databases all the time.
Let me know if you have any questions or ideas about Zemanta.
Jure Cuhalev, Zemanta
jure@zemanta.com
Wow! This looks really cool and like something I've just gotta try out! I think thed open source content available is creating options on both sides, both for producing content and then for using that content within a larger context, say illustration of a blog post or other article.