loadntxt.com blog

The Dash Express as reviewed by GigaOM is a great example of how Web 2.0 applies to real-world needs based on the concept of mashup. To illustrate, Om writes:

For nearly two years, one web company after another has offered an API (application programming interface) as a means to access the data locked up inside their vault. Zilo, Flicker, eBay, Yelp, Yahoo and Google Maps — the list goes on and on. And yet we have not seen anyone come up with a way to combine these disparate data streams together and build a service that helps our everyday life. Sure, we’ve seen some clever mashups, but most of them are locked up inside our browser. Close the lid of your computer and everything is left behind.

Dash, however, has come up with a way to take Web 2.0 to go. The device can pull information from a panoply of sources: gas station listings, restaurant listings, recommendations from Yelp, real estate information from Zillow.com, and so on. Say you’re driving and you see a house for sale — you can enter the address and get the list price from the Zillow.com database. Feel like eating sushi? Enter “sushi” and the device pulls down the nearest sushi restaurant information, including reviews from Yelp or some such service.

That sure gives you an idea on how to create value with mashups, not your ordinary "cut-and-paste" style you put in MySpace or Facebook. Anyway, web services by the way complement the idea of mashups. One example is Zemanta (though this one is launched in alpha yesterday).

Zemanta, aEuropean startup has developed a facility for Wordpress blogs to suggest contextually relevant links, pictures, related content and tags using an internally developed semantic analysis engine. Eventually they will also integrate tabs for third parties who provide vertical-specific suggestions (tech or SEO, for instance).

ReadWriteWeb adds:

The articles Zemanta suggests come from 300 or so "top media sources" as well as the other blogs of Zemanta users. The images suggested come from Wikimedia Commons, flickr, and stock photo providers like Shutterstock and Fotolia. Zemanta also pays close attention to copyright, making sure that suggested content is licensed as Creative Commons or approved by stock providers, so you won’t get into trouble by using Zemanta’s service.

As a blogger, to get your content "Zemified," you’ll need to install the Firefox extension, as the only supported browser at this time is Firefox. Once installed, you only need to visit one of the supported blogging platforms and begin to write your post.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 4:32 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.