woblog

I like to prove or disprove a point and Dans comment in my original post about Zemanta has prompted me to use Zemanta in writing a proper blog post.

I should have pointed out originally that Zemanta is in early Alpha release stage so its no where near polished, but the idea I think is great and its first attempt at it almost works.

All the links and the tags in this article were suggested and added for me by Zemanta. It also suggested related images and articles but these were not really relevant to the article so that feature wasn’t used.

The images returned were all of a Windows XP flavour and I have no way of paging through the images found to see if any others are better, so I have 9 screen shots of Windows XP.

The related articles headlines suggested were:

• Reuse Another Computer’s Windows XP Disk
• Bootcamp 517 - Vista Service Pack 1
• Microsoft: All roads lead to Vista
• Wubi arrives: a look at Ubuntu 8.04 alpha 5
• Get Rid of the Junk Left Over after You Install V….
• Vista-capable lawsuit pains picture of buggy NVI….

Again no paging on the related articles and I really don’t see one article relevant to what I was waffling about.

A big issue with the way the articles are added is the html Zemanta creates, it puts all the links to the articles in a field set tag. Which should only be used with in a form tag. This then breaks our nice and valid blog. Which upsets Dan greatly ;-)

I would have linked to these articles on wikipedia myself, the Microsoft related links actually gave me two choices either a wikipedia article or the products home page which was a nice option.

The basic word matching of the link suggesting works well but the semantic suggesting of images and articles needs serious work. Getting to the core of what a block of text is actually talking about is a very difficult thing to pull off let alone using that to find other articles that are relevant.

While doing this article the suggested articles are much closer to topic, I have a sneeky suspicion this is because the work Zemanta is only going to be in articles pretty much like this one…the images are just wrong and all XP related again.

The link feature again is great. This time however the tags are a bit hit and miss. But its saved me time which is what this tool is all about.