RSSZemanta provides amusement, embellishments for bloggers
By Angela Gunn | Published December 3, 2008, 10:35 AM
Bloggers who may be too pressed for time to find relevant links and images for their posts can now turn to technology. The Zemanta plug-in sifts through possibly relevant material (possibly) for things bloggers can attach to posts.
The Zemanta service, currently in alpha version 0.5.1, shares with many semantic-language products the quality of parsing English like a Roomba vacuum -- getting the job done, more or less, but in a way that'll make you nuts if you watch too closely.
Which is not to say there's not good stuff in there. Zemanta parses the text in individual blog postings, then delves into Wikipedia and various copyright-friendly sources to suggest links and images. Users can also direct Zemanta to sift through their own Flickr accounts, own blogs, and the blogs of friends using Facebook, MyBlogLog and Twitter. The service also understands the black art of search-engine optimization, and makes tag suggestions it feels will improve your post's odds of being found.
At the moment, the service is most "aware" of Wikipedia, and the text we supplied to it came back with links to that service. Being perverse so-and-sos, we found amusement in passing along difficult pieces of text and seeing what the system made of them. For instance, the first stanza of ee cummings' "what if a much of a which of a wind":
what if a much of a which of a wind gives the truth to summer's lie; bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun and yanks immortal stars awry? Blow king to beggar and queen to seem (blow friend to fiend: blow space to time) -when skies are hanged and oceans drowned, the single secret will still be man
The phrase "handed back" (as may be seen in the screen capture below) suggested Wikipedia links to "star," "single (music)," "hanging," "ocean," "begging," and "drowning"; and tag recommendations for "single," "hanging," "business," "begging," "star," "ocean," "kids and teens," and the rather astute suggestion of "philosophy."
The image, on the other hand, remains obscure to us; we examined the image's original tags on Flickr and we're pretty sure the connection is "single," but maybe she's having some sort of existential crisis that applies. We just don't know.
And the primary suggested posts on other blogs were a flat-out mystery -- hanging planters? the perfect Christmas tree? Virgo Love Horoscope for 2009? Several of the secondary choices, however, were posts from music blogs; those matches we liked for our poetry excerpt, and swapping out the astrology foolishness for links to Sigur Ros and Liam Finn write-ups was as simple as clicking on boxes.
It's a little goofy all by itself -- again, have you watched your Roomba lately? -- but when curated by a human hand, Zemanta's got appealing potential to spiff up your blog while you go out and figure out what to actually write in there.
That's the good news. The bad news is that it actually works well enough to truly improve junky blogs -- specifically, the blogs that spammers use to mess with search engines and lure people to their slimy, often malware-ridden sites. But should a tool be criticized simply because the bad guys are going to love it? In any case, hijacking by spammers doesn't appear to be the problem at this stage of development; instead, the Zemanta leads are currently wrestling with questions both obvious (to what sources should the service be linking?) and surprising (how do you keep NSFW images out of the recommendation pool?).
The service is available either via plug-in for blogging platforms that support plug-ins, such as self-hosted Wordpress or Movable Type blogs, or via extension for those that do not.
Hi,
thank you very much for this amusing post :). Gandalf - our community manager - already tackled the formal answer, but I think you are onto something with this!
Maybe we should organize a mini-contest of who manages to get the most bizzare recommendations out of Zemanta. I just don't know what the prizes would be :). We're taking suggestions! :)
Andraz Tori, Zemanta
Score: 0
It's great to see someone reviewing this side of Zemanta. It's true, depending on the style of text it sometimes get confused. The experience is of course much better with real blog posts as we optimize the whole system for that.
Overall, we try to work with bits of information we have. That's most obvious with Flickr where we have to work with user-tagged content, while for Wikimedia Commons we can usually provide image that's a perfect match for topic.
We decided that at the end of the day, we leave full editorial control to blogger. No recommendation is inserted without your explicit click. We've found that many bloggers actually enjoy recommendations that are a bit off, since they provide brainstorming content and also other points of view.
Another thing that we implemented to give more control to bloggers is "filter" button, that allows you to enter keywords and this will then influence results.
If anyone has questions or would like more specific answers about Zemanta, I'm happy to respond, either here or via email.
Jure Cuhalev, Zemanta
jure@zemanta.com
Score: 0