A while back I met Jurey Chalev of Zemanta.com at SemanticCamp here in London. Zemanta is a really cool tool for content suggestion for blog posts. The company was started as part of the Seedcamp competition of last year and is one of the few companies to make it to the end of that program.

What Zemanta does is fairly simple, which is probably why it’s such a great tool. Zemanta offers a plugin for Firefox that recognizes when people are editing a Wordpress, Blogger, or TypePad blogpost. On these platforms Zemanta then adds a few features to the interface, enabling people to easily add images, articles, links and tags to their blog post just by clicking the suggestions made by Zemanta.com.

The Zemanta Interface (click for large view)

To set an example, this blog post has been enhanced with the help of Zemanta. I wrote the article and in the end just clicked on the things I wanted to add in the interface, like the links for Wordpress and Seedcamp, the images, and the “other articles” at the bottom.

Zemanta’s business model is to eventually be able to sell the links shown in the suggestion engine to third parties, going for a kind of AdWords model where the adds might be in the blog post directly. It is a difficult question to answer if this will eventually become more of an annoyance than a service, but for now I think the signal to noise ratio of the suggestions is nothing to complain about.

For now Zemanta is only available as a Firefox plugin, but more platforms will be supported in the feature.

This article was originally posted at the blog of Sjors Timmer, besides doing MA in Digital Media at Goldsmiths in London, he is also involved in doing web design work

The Jesus Phone

The enormous media hype around the “Jesus-phone” proved it once again: there is only one leading company in consumer technology, and that is Apple. In current time there seems to be no other company able to sell a piece of the future than the Cupertino dream-weavers. Once bought however, the great promise turns out to be quite an ordinary thing which is certainly not as good as those futurists had promised. But at that moment it is already too late, so why do we still keep forgiving them for selling overpriced products that are over and over again still not quite there yet?

The Future Promise Paradigm

To get some answers on that question, we can take a look at three ways of how the future is often used as an excuse to manipulate us into accepting things that would normally not directly benefit us optimally.

1. The future is often used to force us to change our habits for own benefits. The products that use this tactic often send the message that “change in our way of working and living” is needed to improve our situation.
2. The promise of the future can be used to keep us from complaining. If a product or service might not be that good today, the promise of improvements in the future is a good incentive to continue on. In other words: be strong, keep going, everything will be alright….. soon.
3. The future is used as a shared dream of mankind, as one day we’ll all be united. If you want the best for the world stay with us, and if you don’t adopt you are obviously against the best interest of mankind.

These partly overlapping points can be found both in business and governmental planning and often tries to explain their choices for the future. (more…)

I went to the Apple Store in Regent Street today to get a free Leopard t-shirt. I was a bit early and noticed a line was forming so got a spot as 9th in line at about 3:30PM. Eventually hundreds of people got in line behind me and Melinda (and a few people even were arrogant enough to get in line in front of us, assholes!). At 6 the doors opened and I had to push some queue jumpers who were told a couple of times by us and Apple employees to *** off.

Strange thing is that, although we only went for the t-shirt (first 500 would get one), we eventually ended up buying a family license as we have 3 macs anyway. Most of the photos can be found below or on my flickr page.

PS: We got applauded at which felt really weird and cool at the same time.