Zemanta Archive

Blogging service Zemanta has announced a new integration today with the hosted version of blogging platform WordPress. Zemanta’s blogging tool has been available since the early days of the company for the self-hosted version of WordPress (like we use here at CN) and now anyone using the hosted version of WordPress can also benefit from Zemanta’s service.

From the announcement, “Currently, Zemanta works on English-language blogs and can only be used in the visual editor mode. It’s not available on private blogs. Photos recommended by Zemanta are copyright-cleared, but we urge you to check out the photo’s license if you have any doubts (you can do that by hovering over the photo).”

Zemanta’s goal is to bring together relevant databases and help enhance content across the Web and in email. They use a variety of databases including Amazon, IMDB and Wikipedia. Zemanta uses “entity extraction” to determine what terms and phrases they should offer suggestions for.

Zemanta CEO and co-founder Boštjan Špetič forwarded the announcement to us (along with probably every other tech blog) and notes that in the first three hours since the integration went live, over 800 WordPress hosted bloggers have activated the plugin. Boštjan also notes that Zemanta is now available for use by over 30% of all blogs worldwide.

If you are new to the Zemanta service, checkout our interview with the founders to learn more about how Zemanta works and their business model.

Blogging service Zemanta has announced a new integration with Google’s Blogger blogging platform. Previously Blogger users had to install a browser plugin to use Zemanta. This new integration will allow any Blogger user to activate the Zemanta widget — the user can then use Zemanta without any browser installations.

After the content creator writes a few lines of content, Zemanta’s service will automatically show recommendations for both links and images.

If you are new to the Zemanta service, checkout our interview with the founders to learn more about how Zemanta works and their business model.

Blogging service Zemanta has announced the launch of their “Balloons” service. Zemanta’s goal is to bring together relevant databases and help enhance content across the Web and in email. They use a variety of databases including Amazon, IMDB, Wikipedia and Last.fm.

Zemanta Balloons are similar to what Snap offers — you can see an example below. If you are using Zemanta on your blog, you can add the balloons option. This allows readers to see a sample of the content behind the link before the reader clicks on the link. Zemanta notes that the content comes from, “the openly licensed Freebase database and content from YouTube, Google Maps and MusicBrainz, as well as millions of articles from Freebase contributors.”

As for the technology behind the balloons Zemanta notes, “the code underpinning Balloons is open source and built on Common Tag architecture, the open tagging format – developed by Zemanta, Freebase, Yahoo!, AdaptiveBlue, and others that aims to make content more connected, discoverable and engaging.”

On the Zemanta Balloons test page, one of the links provides content from Wikipedia and a link to Amazon for the product. While I don’t see an affiliate code in the link, it could be a way for Zemanta to generate revenue from the Balloons functionality.

One interesting note – in IE7 if you start a video inside one of the balloons and then mouse away, the video keeps playing and the only remedy is to close the tab or browser.

Related: Our full Zemanta coverage.

Last month we reported on Zemanta’s launch of a rich email widget for Gmail and Yahoo Mail. Today I met with Zemanta CEO Aleš Špetič while he is in NYC on business. Ales tells me that very soon they will launch their email widget for the Outlook and Thunderbird email clients. They have also opened an office in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn.

Zemanta’s goal is to bring together relevant databases and help enhance content across the Web and in email. They use a variety of databases including Amazon, IMDB, Wikipedia, Last.fm and Crunchbase. I’ve noted in conversation that Crunchbase should probably be paying Zemanta for all of the free SEO-rich links Zemanta provides.

Zemanta uses "entity extraction" to determine what terms and phrases they should offer suggestions for. They are currently at about 80% accuracy rate and are working on continuing to improve the accuracy and Ales says this piece is very expensive as it requires a lot of machine computing power.

Zemanta offers the links I noted above along with the ability to add related links to content. Related links can come from anywhere and are basically randomized and there is no weight to the links so that a link from a lesser-known blog may show up while the category leader isn’t displayed. A link from Mashable or CN will never appear as an option inside the content of the story, only as a related link.

Ales says they have 30,000 active authors and are a 10 person team with 8 people at their headquarters in Slovenia and 2 people in NYC. They are funded by two venture capital firms in London and Union Square Ventures here in NYC. They began working on the product in mid-2007, raised their first round in January 2008 and launched the product in March of 2008.

We spoke about Zemanta’s business model and Ales noted that they will use a combination of highlighted stories/links and affiliate links. They plan to go to media organizations and offer to "highlight" a link in the list of links that are presented to an author. They also are working on getting paid from affiliate revenue.

We concluded our chat and Ales shared another stat about Zemanta usage — a 41% retention rate which is measured six weeks after widget installation.

Slovenia-based Zemanta has announced a variety of important product updates today. Zemanta provides a set of content tools which help bloggers "enhance" their posts. They have updated their widget to offer support for video, audio and Web apps including Google Maps. Zemanta has also created "content verticals" in categories including: music, tech, health and travel. The idea of the verticals is to have a set of content sources on hand for each content category.

The other update is a major update for Zemanta. The widget they offer to bloggers will now be available to Yahoo Mail and Google Gmail users. The widget is installed as a toolbar for Firefox. Once the toolbar is activated, Zemanta users can enhance their emails by adding images and links, similar to the blogging product. The company also notes that you can create "postcards" which can be personalized and sent via your email provider. It’s a very interesting extension to writing emails although I wonder how often a person will want to enhance their emails.

One interesting thing I’ve noted with Zemanta is just how many juicy SEO links they push out to sites like Wikipedia and Crunchbase. When a person picks an image for a company, Zemanta drops the image into the post, links to Crunchbase below the image and links the image (with a follow tag) to the page that the image references. In fact, I’ve wondered if Crunchbase would rank so high for company searches if it wasn’t for Zemanta.

Maybe there’s a business model in the links. For example, Crunchbase could pay Zemanta a fee each time their links are displayed on a user’s post. Maybe the user who initiated the link gets a cut of the fee. Of course that would just mean that Crunchbase (and the others) are paying for in-text linking which could easily be gamed and is against Google’s TOS, but perhaps it’s an idea that could spark other revenue ideas for the company.

Perhaps the better idea is to allow the content sources to bid on placement in the widget for each keyword. The more you bid, the higher you are listed on the source list.