Image via WikipediaListening to technology-podcasts on the german Handelsblatt.com-website, I heard about Zemanta. It is a service that uses a firefox–plugin to read out your blogged text and parsing it for “words they know”. They present you links, tags and images to embed in your blog post, showing you links to wikipedia-articles and pictures fitting the content. Just after finishing this sentence, the sidebar that gets embedded in my webbackend of wordpress refreshes. Whoa! I got 5 links for the first sentence and I just included them all. I also included a pic you see floating right.
This is what many people think the semantic web or Web 3.0 to be. And in a way, it is. The use of Web 3.0 (the term in my understanding encapsulates user-generated-content as in Web 2.0 and the semantic web) in blogging seems logical to me as blogging the one of the most public displays of Web 2.0. This firefox-plugin makes it much easier to generate interesting articles and IF it doesn’t break my blog frontend, I’ll definitely use it in every post from here on. But back to the functions:
Image by pshab via FlickrYou can press an update-button and your content gets scanned again. New pictures appear and new links can be included. Just realized that most links are Wikipedia ones, but some (like the firefox-plugin-link or the Zemanta-link at the top) are also directed at other “well-known” resources. You can search for a term you put into a searchbar and get links, content and new pics. I tried “semantic web” for example. You can drag-and-drop pictures into the content-pane, and it gets easily included.
We’re standing on the edge of Web 3.0. I don’t think that this here is all that Web 3.0 is about, but I think its a great application that can be called “Web 3.0”-ly. If you would like to use this ff-plugin too, just go to their website and install it. You’ll have to agree to their TOS, that basically says “don’t change anything our plugin includes” and “we need access to the text you write” and “you are in charge for your content and all content you get from us as we show you the license”. So now I hope this post doesn’t get destroyed by some bad constructed CSS on my side. Fire and forget – or do you have any comments, iThoughts or fears about this plugin? You may also comment in german.
Image via Wikipedia
Image via WikipediaRelated articles by Zemanta
- Zamanta – Automatically build backlinks (kiaso.wordpress.com)
- Semantic Technologies 2008 – Wednesday Sessions (wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk)
- A semantic web future – Intelligent internet (digital-constructions.com)
- We Are Facebook – Resistance Is Futile (montysmegamarketing.com)
- What is Zemanta? (mb7art.wordpress.com)
Hmmm… TOS wurde nicht auf Terms of Service, sondern auf Type of Service verlinkt. Dass die Schrift im ersten externen Bild nicht sichtbar ist, habe ich in dem white-background WordPress-Backend nicht gesehen, soviel zu externem Content … und die eingefügten Links unten habe ich natürlich auch nicht überprüft, “We are Facebook – Resistance is futile” is beispielsweise nur wegen dem lustigen Namen reingekommen. Trotzdem eine echt tolle Sache :-)
That’s really an interesting extension, never heard of it before. I’m not sure if I would assign it to Web 3.0, because I don’t see much underlying semantic except for keyword-matching, but on the other hand the term is not well defined until now anyway. And whatever it’s called, this extension can be really useful in terms of enriching blog or other content. The integration of wordpress is good, I’ll keep it for a while and see, if it will prove useful for myself.
You ask for fears… well it’s difficult to tell so early, but something that came to my mind: Many things in Web 2.0 and beyond, if useful, get copied very fast. So what happens, if to many people use this service? People will get lazy searching for good pictures or enhancements themselves and just rely on the tool. Not only will there be very similar content then, but also less diverse content. Of course, it’s way to early to really estimate that, just what I was thinking about. Until this happens, it’s surely a nice tool ;) .