Change the World With One Click: Zemanta Adds Volunteer Opportunities to Blog Posts
What would you call a real-time semantic analysis tool that plugs in to your blogging software and leverages an API for a huge database of petitions, charities and volunteer opportunities to change the world which is powered by an extensible markup language that lets anyone load in more calls to action? Hot as hell - that's what we'd call it.
Zemanta, a fascinating service that offers bloggers relevant links, photos and other assets to include in their blog posts, announced a great new feature today - semantically related calls to action for social good, powered by a new API from the organization Social Actions.
By leveraging the new Social Actions API, Zemanta reads the text you're writing while you blog, figures out what topics you're writing about, and gives you one-click options to add related links to petitions and campaigns from nonprofit and socially conscious organizations to the bottom of your blog post.
Social Actions currently offers more than 60,000 opportunities from over 50 different organizations, from Kiva, to Volunteer Match, to Wildlife Direct. The organization is rolling out an XML based markup that will allow anyone to add data to the collection with ease.
The next step is more sophisticated filtering, but for now blog authors do that manually. It's remarkably easy to do. Zemanta's core product is a plug-in that works particularly well with WordPress blogs but you can test the new Social Action component on this page.
Some topics are going to bring better results than others. It will be interesting to see how much overlap there is between most bloggers around the web and the database of nonprofit calls to action. After all, if most people really cared about or felt capable of making the world a better place, then the world would be a really different place. Perhaps, though, all these smart technologies bringing social change right to our fingertips will make opportunities like this easier to act on.
Share
Facebook
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
Marshall,
Thank you so much for sharing Zemanta's new tie-in with Social Actions. It's something we're very excited about!
Zemanta's update was spurred by Social Actions' recent Change the Web Challenge (http://bit.ly/changetheweb) - a contest to create web apps and widgets that draw on Social Actions' Open API.
Submissions for the Change the Web Challenge just closed last Friday, April 3rd.
I want to give to a huge shout out to the other 35 apps (and their creators) who created & submitted awesome widgets, gadgets, plugins, extensions, applications, & mashups that help you engage with actions on just about any website & lots of mobile. A number of the submissions also help you visualize and filter actions (filtering actions is key for distributing the opportunities w/the most relevance/impact/potential)
You can check out the other apps in the Project Gallery here - http://www.netsquared.org/projectgallery/changetheweb
This is also the week to vote for your favorite apps! Your vote will help determine the 20 Finalists - an expert panel of judges will then select the top 3 to share 10k in prizes!
More on voting - http://www.netsquared.org/changetheweb/vote
***
I also think your conclusion is spot on. We're working to make it easier to change the world - but it requires all of us stepping up if we really want to make the world a better place.
Best,
Joe Solomon
Director, Social Actions' Change the Web Challenge
(http://bit.ly/changetheweb)
I've been using Zemanta on my blog and have the browser add on for sometime now. Its an amazing semantic tool and i am almost addicted to it, as it makes my blogging and emailing easy. I am amazed by the accuracy with which it suggests links, tags, photos, etc.
Now, with this new feature, Zemanta has had me floored! All of us would like to be associated with a good cause, in a way or other...what better than just linking up key phrases to spread the word!! I totally love what they are doing. Kudos!
Great tool for all the bloggers! is very intereting for me and for my daily work.
I´m going to test it righ now.
thank you for your blog
Zemanta is great. Thanks Marshall, for bringing more light to what the Social Actions team is doing! I'm excited to see the service continue to grow as it attracts more people with similar competitions and contests.
I actually build a web app that uses the Social Actions API with semantics/linked open data as well.
http://www.imdoingmypart.org/community/map
Unfortunately social actions doesn't have location info for the majority of their content. I'm using an entity extractor to pull out entities. Those that are geographic locations are then geocoded and displayed on a map.
You are able to see what people are doing where in real time! For example an organization just announced (3 hours ago) that they are looking for an organic farmer in Patagonian Chile.
Would love to hear your feedback/suggestions! (maybe even a write up?) =)
Cheers!
john
hi guys,
tnx Marshal for covering this, we were very excited when we heard about socialactions API and are proud to be enabling such progressive initiatives.
and a big thank you to all commentators for compliments, we are trying hard to improve all the time, and don't hesitate to ping us via email if there is anything on your mind regarding the service. we are listening.
and @john, re location tagging, did you know zemanta has an API as well that can recognize geo-entities? do take a look at developer.zemanta.com or just drop me an email.
best, bostjan
zemanta
This won't get much press, but it is certainly one of the more interesting, and potentially powerful, integrations I've seen. I need to figure out how this works more specifically so I can let the non-profs I know learn to use it. Looking at Charity Navigator, it is glaringly obvious that most 501(c)(3)'s have issues with the efficiency of their promotions. Their historic reliance on junk mail, spam, telemarketing mostly turns me, and many others, off.
Posted by: coldbrew
|
April 8, 2009 6:40 AM
@bostjan:
couldn't find geo stuff in your doc (didnt download PDF tho). cant find your email either. you can get in touch with me.. my first name at janisb.com
or twitter: @worldlyjohn