Thursday, October 16, 2008

Zemanta: One great way to kick down the silo walls

Image of Jure Cuhalev from TwitterImage of Jure CuhalevImage of Jure CuhalevI came across Zemanta some time ago. Probably via Fred Wilson, who I spoke alongside at Widget Web Expo in New York in the summer.
And Widget Web Expo in London last week closed the circle. Because I met one of the Zemanta crew. Jure Cuhalev came up to me after seeing me present on 'The User is the Destination Now - Widgets role in the Eighth Mass Media'.
No surprise given my central theme - my vision of where the networked world takes us, if you like.
In a nutshell, if you can connect in real time with people who share your purpose, globally, you get to solve more problems and create more value. One extra node on your network doubles its value, as Reed's Law would have it. People and what they say to each other are the way those connections are made.
But, the thing that restricts this exponential growth explosion is silos. In twitter I can only connect with people in twitter, who have already connected with me etc. Facebook is worse still.
Blogs are good, blogs and rss feeds and readers etc.
Zemanta does what BlogFriends tried. It introduces you to stuff and people you didn't know you need to know. And that's how adhoc communities of purpose form.
Zemanta takes this beyond silos by introducing me to things beyond my current network. It's an ambitious grab at creating that global hotdesk I've written about before.
They are still stuck in one crucial silo: language - it's primarily an English language tool. But Jure tells me they are working on that.
Wishing you luck guys - and from today, running it on this blog.
Zemanta (in their own words) delivers: "relevant content from all over the web... instantly as you blog.Builds traffic with immediate tagged links created between your posts and others sharing related conversations on all popular browsers and blogging platforms.
In short it connects people who share the same concerns. A great enabler for Communities of Purpose.

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1 comment:

  1. Unfortunately the only draw back to Zemanta is that the software has the potential to be abused by sploggers, who may find it easier to leech off the backs of a future giant than to purchase the software to scrap content themselves.
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