Image by Zemanta via CrunchBase

• Get Mentioned
• Make Your Post More Visually Appealing
• Link to Related Posts
• Choose Good Tags for Your Posts
• Link to Bloggers in Your Niche
• Make a Little Money

It is hard enough to write at times and then you have to do all of the above also. Well, maybe not all of the above, but at least some of it. Unless, of course, you want to be your blog’s only subscriber.

And right now, as I am writing this, this is being done for me. Well, not the “Get Mentioned” part, but that button at the bottom of this post may help with that.

The rest is covered, almost like a personal assistant for your blog. I have been using Zemanta for a while and they had been mentioning customizable features for a while. Well, they released the new version during Blog World Expo and I tried it out the first day.

Now you can add your friends from Facebook, MyBlogLog, and Twitter, you can use your own pictures from Flickr, and add up to 130 of your own feed sources.

For more details, check out the Zemanta demo or read more about Zemanta at Bloghology. And if you want to see my ideas on using Zemanta for a niche blog, go to my other blog.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Have You Tried Zemanta?
• Hands On With Zemanta – Your Blog Writing Concierge?

 

Image by eristoddle via Flickr

The First Day

Okay, I think I am much more put together today. I meant to get a nap in all day yesterday after checking out the 4 block radius around my room. I put some pictures up in Flickr. It seems that there are as many cranes here as there are casinos.

I didn’t manage to take the nap until 5:30 in the evening. And I basically slept through until 4:30am today. But I am ready to go now. Sleep deprivation has a way of making a person edgy, unorganized, and a little bit moody. Not a good state.

Before I did get a nap, I managed to walk down and get my pass to the expo. And the convention center is huge. I think some of the small towns in my home state would fit inside the building.

Don’t make the mistake of trying to walk through the whole thing to get to the South Hall, which is where the Expo is. After about 20 minutes of that and walking through an Expo of the latest and greatest in mining equipment, I found out you have to leave the building and walk outside to the South Hall. But today I know exactly where to go.

I also picked up a bunch of free magazines. Freebies are cool. Not just the current version of Blogger & Podcaster Magazine, but a few back issues as well. And speaking of magazines,

Bloghology

The print magazine didn’t make it. It was a rush deal and we pushed the first issue to try to get it to the printers in time. It was just not enough this time. But you can still check out the digital issue. This was a great disappointment, but you can’t win everything. We are still going to make this the best magazine on blogging out there and one of the only.

The cover story is an interview with Yaro Starak, who also wrote a great post about the magazine. So visit his site and check his post on Bloghology out.

Today’s Plan

Today’s plan is to get as much out of this first day at Blog World Expo as I can. The schedule is a little bit confusing and it’s seems that there are so many speakers that some are speaking at the same time and you have to make a decision as to what you want to learn. I am still not quite sure what I have access to yet.

So I am going to jump in and play it by ear.

I also plan on getting a pass to the monorail and just riding it like a bum around for a few hours if I get a chance after BWE. I still have some gifts to get.

The kids will settle for the regular touristy things. But the wife is going to need something special after spending the weekend alone with the monsters. We have only spent one day apart for four years. Not that I will find or afford something special, but I will try my hardest.

News

Friendfeed has changed their look.

Twitter has changed their look.

Zemanta is starting to kick ass giving you the ability to add your own Flickr photos and feeds to your suggestion pool. It is something I have been waiting for. You can also filter your results if you don’t think Zemanta is getting quite right.

It is now 8:30 and I have to get a move on. See everyone there.

A while ago I wrote a post questioning the issue of reblogging. Posts are often reblogged on meme tracking sites which use an algorithm to detect popular stories and ideas. Posts are also reblogged to blanket certain categories or markets. And then some are reblogged by people with made for Adsense sites or splogs.

My reason for covering the topic was to create a more complete picture of what I am trying to present with a post. I can’t cover everything and if I write a post about feeds, it would be nice to have the past research I did on the subject not only readily available to me while I write, but also for the readers who want to dig deeper into the subject.

And what if after I wrote the post about feeds, brand new sites start popping up that extend the subject even further. If I bookmark these or tag them somehow, it would be nice for future readers of the post to have access to the new, updated links. That way the post itself becomes a growing thing, adapting to new changes.

Yes, I could go back in and update each post, but I write on a lot of topics. And the framework is here for a system that I am envisioning. WordPress has a API. Posts have tags. Delicious has a API. Bookmarks have tags. Flickr has an API. Flickr has tags. I could keep going with this if I wanted.

Of course, as usual, I was working without the correct terminology which I do a lot. I just really want to get something done and don’t really care how or what words are used to describe it. But I guess there is one: semantic.

And to continue not using terminology that seems overly complex to protect the average person from realizing how simple it really is, let’s define the semantic web.

The semantic web defines how thing relate to one another. In the system above, a bookmark will relate to a post based on the tags in both items. It also defines the properties of those items. A post is a post. A bookmark is a bookmark. Other properties are the dates and times of said posts and bookmarks. A more complex definition starts looking like the sentences you diagrammed in English class. We don’t need to go that far. To go into more detail, without that much detail, read Semantic Web: What is the killer app?

In other words, I can go to my blog to find my posts, to delicious to find my bookmarks, to Flickr to find my photos, to StumbleUpon to find my favorites… Or I can use the feeds of these accounts and a little bit of software to bring them to me all at once. If they are already categorized and tagged, why sort it all out again when you are writing a post?

The search is still on, though I have found a few sites closer to what I am looking for:

BlogRovr

I saw this as a possibility. It is a Firefox extension that suggests related blog posts while you are browsing. You are allowed to pick and choose the feeds you add to your own personal Rovr. I thought this would be great for linking out to other blogs as I write my posts, which added yet another dimension to the software I was looking for. But after I upload my OPML file and browsed around, I got very few suggestions at any blogs I visited.

Zemanta

Plain and simple, kicks ass. I thought I had found my answer. But there is no way to customize it so far. But it is damn worth looking into and this one I still have installed. It is a Firefox extension and it works with all of my WordPress blogs. It adds extra menus in the page itself instead of hanging off the side of the browser like BlogRovr.

The light orange areas were all added by Zemanta. Worth a look. But like I said, it would be nice to access the feeds I subscribe to, posts from my blog, and bookmarks from my delicious account so I could choose and not have posts from the top 300 blogs chosen for me.

Ligit

Close but no cigar. Plus I have to take a look at the links this thing puts on your site. This is not a javascript widget. It’s a PHP one and each followed link goes back through the ligit site.

Yahoo Pipes

This looks like it has some possibilities to build what I am looking for.

And again, whether or not my definitions are correct. I don’t really give a crap. Definitions never did anything. Action does. I am a man of action. If semantic no longer fits, I will use "contextual feed matching" or "why won’t this work ’cause it’s God Damned simple". And I will still be looking for this answer or developers or will do it myself.

And finally some other links of interest that I didn’t have time to investigate fully because I am not writing a thesis here:

• Lumifi
• The Top Down Approach
• Dapper
• Twine – Registered but didn’t get the invite.
• SemanticHacker – Damn I wish I had this technology. But I can access the API now.
• PingTheSemanticWeb

And for those of you who want to take it even further. What if the semantic web could be the knowledge base for an AI processor? A mind the size of the internet. Always the science fiction fan.

P.S. Since I use LiveWriter and then upload to my blog, I couldn’t add the Zementa links until I did. Here they are:

• Open Your Data
• Is Tagcow the Future of Photo Recognition

Which led me to Triplify. All I can say is that I would have never found these sites through Google (social graph?, get real).

And for now, until I find a way to organize everything around seed posts, everything gets fed into my Tumbler account, which I wish could import Delicious and WordPress tags. Is this the end of this post? I doubt it.