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.

The first release of hAvatar created some exposure and the testing page gathered a lot feedback with strange cases which were not being handled correctly yet.

I implemented some fixes and extra functionality both in hAvatar and in hKit so the entire page renders correctly now. One important update is that it now correctly finds the representative hCard for a page when there are multiple hCards.

That being done I release a new version 0.3 as an archive and into the mercurial repository.

Get it like this:
hg clone static-http://alper.nl/hg/havatar/

Microformats wiki page

The avatar on this page is not displayed using this plugin because of some obscure Solaris bug.

I had the idea for a Wordpress plugin replacing the avatar systems of gravatar and MyBlogLog with a microformat based one a while back.

The principle is simple. If you comment somewhere and you leave behind a URL (be it a blog one or an OpenID) and we can follow that URL and find a representative hCard with associated picture for you, it means we can present that picture as your avatar.

It works just as well as most avatar standards out there, it’s distributed and built on top of a proven microformat and gives people a benefit for publishing an hCard on their blog or elsewhere.

Development

Writing that plugin didn’t prove to be too difficult. Integrating Drew McLellan’s hKit library into Wordpress was a bit harder due to my limited experience with PHP and its bizarre quirks.

That hurdle passed I have been using the plugin on my own blog and Cristiano is using it as well. We’ve only had problems running it on this weblog most probably because something on the Solaris installation we are running is interfering (I have no clue what). You can test the plugin yourself on this test weblog.

There are some ideas in here which are similar to those of DiSo in their wishlist for a wp-openid-avatars plugin.

Release

After having spent some due dilligence testing and refining this plugin, I think it’s ready to be released and tested by a larger group of people. The plugin will not do much without you editing your theme as well and making a decision about the presentation of the avatar images.

Alternatively if gravatar() is not defined yet, it will define itself as the gravatar function as well. So a theme which relies on gravatar can expect this plugin to support it.

Get a zip with the plugin in it here, or you can checkout my repository:
hg clone static-http://alper.nl/hg/havatar/

Feedback, suggestions and patches welcome. Caching and resizing are issues that have to be solved in the future.

I found a plugin called identikit which covers a lot of the same ground but is mostly in French. hAvatar is a simple and pure microformats based approach.

Matthew Mullenweg, founding father of Wordpress, had some nice insights on how to scale your business as a webstartup during FOWA. His presentation (to be found here) ranged from the technical side of scaling to the business side of scaling. In this business side he had some interesting insides that I a) didn’t know Wordpress did and b) hadn’t even ever thought about doing.

When we talk about Wordpress there are two products that can be recognized; Wordpress.org is the software that you can run on your own server, and Wordpress.com is the hosted solution for the less tech savvy people amongst us. When talking about scaling his business, Matt was talking about Wordpress.com which was gained users in exponential rate in the last few years.

Obviously at a certain time, any web application developer and decent entrepreneur will consider advertisement. In the age of Google with their Google-Adsense, ads have proven to be a successful stream of revenue for webapps, especially if your app has a big uptake on traffic. Still, many entrepreneurs that started with a social concept and a gathered a solid community will be hesitant about subjecting their loyal users to ads. As a result some find a different source of revenue (selling your statistics?) while others make Pro packages that let users get rid of the ads.

Wordpress.com went in an other direction when they made a clear distinction between loyal users and people reaching their blogs by accident. They noticed that a certain big percentage of their page visits came through search engines like Google. Clearly these people were already presented with ads at those points and adding the same kind of adds to the Wordpress page could be leveraged as some kind of second-level advertising. The cool thing about this though is, that by only offering these ads to people coming from the search engines, the loyal users and readers of Wordpress.com blogs were spared the advertisements and the annoyance.

The logic behind all this is pretty solid. People searching for something might actually be interested in the relevant product that is presented in the ads next to the articles. Loyal readers though will most of the time come to the site no matter what the content was as they are more interested in the user that writes the blog. This is enhanced by the effect that RSS feeds have on people actually being loyal readers no matter what someone writes.

Therefore, only offering ads to the people that are proven to be more likely to click on them makes perfect sense. The result is that when you are a Wordpress.com author or loyal reader, you will rarely even know there are ads.

Thank you Matt for this cool idea, and for saving us bloggers from a world of advertisements!