Zemanta - Semantically Augmented Blogging

In the midst of one of my trips to London last year, I received a last-minute invitation to speak to a room full of entrepreneurs at a venture capital firm. I was happy to oblige and talked to them about EC2, S3, and so forth. One of the entrepreneurs in attendance was Andraž Tori of Zemanta.  At that time he couldn't really tell me what he was working on but it was clear that he was really attracted to EC2's promise of cost-effective, scalable processing power.

Late last week he  emailed me to tell me that they had launched their first product and that they had been featured on TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb.

I was able to install and try out Zemanta earlier this week and it is really cool.

Taking the form of a Firefox extension, it sat quietly in the background waiting for me to start blogging. When I switched to my Typepad tab, Zemanta augmented the editing page with an image gallery, a list of suggested articles, and a list of suggested links. Every 300 characters or so it analyzed the text and updated the suggestions, which I found to be both relevant and helpful. This isn't a tool that will write blog posts for you. Rather, it will help to make a good post better by making you aware of existing, related content and by reducing the amount of work needed to include salient links.

Andraž told me that "We do all our request processing in EC2, extensively use S3 and we have some use of SimpleDB also!"

-- Jeff;