What does Zemanta have to do with Freebase and Balloons?

On July 30, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson
Image representing Zemanta as depicted in Crun...

Image via CrunchBase

Besides the fact that Freebasing and Balloons both have drug connotations Zemanta is partnering with social database company Freebase to launch a new addicting blog feature called Balloons.

You know those annoying little mouse over preview scripts that pop-up on blog and let you look at the page before you click through but don’t really tell you much? This is nothing like that. Balloons are useful pop-ups that actually let you watch video, see a map or read a wikipedia entry without having to leave the page. It’s very cool and I’m really excited for this feature to get pushed out. It was released today but like many FireFox plugins we’ll probably have to wait a day or two before see it.  Check out the page for a demo http://www.zemanta.com/balloons/

Here’e what Zemanta had to say in their announcement:

Zemanta launches Balloons, open multimedia overlays for bloggers

Balloons, launched today by Zemanta in co-operation with Freebase, are dynamic overlays that allow any blogger or online publisher to integrate multimedia content – including YouTube, Google Maps – and Freebase infoboxes – into their pages.

Balloons give bloggers and publishers access to the openly licensed Freebase database and content from YouTube, Google Maps and MusicBrainz, as well as millions of articles from Freebase contributors.

Whenever Balloons are added to a blog post or article, small, unobtrusive icons appear next to the key links in the page.  By clicking on these icons, readers can preview content without leaving the page and discover additional links to related items.  This allows web publishers to integrate all kinds of rich content into their posts without requiring users to leave their site.

Update: The guys at Zemanta alerted me to the fact that this is available already, you just need to go into your settings and enable it. Let me know what you think.

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  • Just came upon this discussion by way of RWW's face-off between Apture & Zemanta. I'm glad that these guys are restoring some cool to contextual links. I'm at MashLogic, and we're approaching this from the user's direction. We have a browser addon that automatically enriches web pages with "rich contextual links".

    In addition, we've built MashFeeds that index your RSS feeds and add relevant links back to your blog from any web page.

    It would be wonderful if you would care to review our app, but at the very least I'm throwing our hat into the ring of "The New Generation of User-friendly In-Text Link Applications".
  • Ranjit,
    thanks for the heads up. I'll have to check out Mashlogic.
  • Tac: sounds good.

    To get a sense of MashFeeds, check out the term cloud we've extracted from your RSS feeds (posts & comments). Click on any term to see links back to your blog.

    We're just starting to make term clouds available to bloggers. You supply one or more RSS feeds, set the # of terms & cloud size, and we'll dynamically build a term cloud to help your visitors navigate your site. We believe that our term clouds provide much more specific and meaningful terms than usual. Let me know if you would be interested in participating in our rollout.
  • andraz
    Tac,

    we also launched "ReBlog this paragraph" ... try clicking on a small icon at the end of the paragraph when you hover over it. I think it's pretty cool innovation, but we need to do more user experience work to make it more obvious and maybe add "Retweet this paragraph". :)

    bye
    andraz
  • I'm kind of new at all of this. Wordpress has "snap view" I think they call it. Balloons is decidedly different?

    Thanks!

    Craig
  • I'd definitely go with Tac here, Snap is the work of the blogging devils! ;-)
  • Craig, snap view is the less than useful pop-up I referenced (I personally find it more annoying than helpful). It provides you a snap shot of the site you're going to click through to. Balloons pulls the relevant content from Wikipedia, YouTube, or Google maps. Only works on specific links.
  • Thanks, Tac! I disabled snap view because it was so annoying. However, I can not seem to get balloons to function with either Gmail or my WordPress.com blog and I did go to preferences on Zemanta and, I believe, enabled the "balloons/info" feature. Zemanta continues to work great. Just can't get the new feature.

    Thanks!

    Craig
  • Craig, only certain content works right now, Wikipedia, YouTube and Google maps. And I've only gotten it to work when I write posts directly in WordPress.
  • Thanks, Tac! I can't get any of it to work but I am using a WordPress .com blog and my guess is you are using a .org account? 10-4 on the Gmail. Thanks!!

    Craig
  • Hi Folks! Confirmed with Zemanta. They do not support Gmail or WordPress.com accounts. Bummer dude! :)
    http://getsatisfaction.com/zemanta/topics/ballo...
  • Sounds a lot like what Apture have been doing for a while:

    http://apture.com
  • Yes, but the last time I checked with Apture you had to write your post, publish it and then go in and add the rich media from the front end. A very cool product but way to cumbersome. I know they were working on fixing this so maybe I should check to see if they've made any progress but know I'm wondering if there's a point since Zemanta does this much more simply?
  • Yep, now you just install the plugin and insert the links/media, etc, as you write your post, then publish.

    The one thing I didn't like about Zemanta when I used it was it took up too much real estate on your dashboard (most of the right hand side of the admin area was "Zemantafied") ;-)

    The bubble approach looks cool - I just think Apture has a little more widespread use. Be interesting to see how they compare in a face-off.
  • I remember when I saw them both demo at the same event. I was already a Zemanta user and Apture wasn't that well developed but did look promising.

    At the time they did not overlap as much in functionality. Zemanta was more focused more on related articles and links, Apture more on embedded rich media. Zemanta is definitely moving in that direction with this move. I think they're still more focused on the semantic angle and as you noted don't have the enterprise pick up yet.

    They definitely play to different types of users though. Apture is more for the "visual" types and Zemanta is more for the "linkers" (if that makes any sense). I fall in the latter obviously.

    Hopefully there's room for both because I do like both companies.
  • Hmm, I may have to re-look at Zemanta then (although I do like Apture as well). Gah, why can't everyone just get along and be multi-compatible? :)

    By the way, Tac, found your blog through a Google Alert, and like it a lot - consider me subscribed! :)
  • Thanks Danny, Just clicked through and subscribed to you blog, Posterous and Twitter.

    And yes, I wish everyone just played nice.
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