The next time you find your desire to write lacking, Plinky may be just the inspiration you need.

Shellen doesn't just know blogging, he's lived it. Now he's hoping to inspire others.

Where Does the Inspiration Come From?

Plinky is simple and straightforward. Every day, the service delivers writing prompts in hopes of eliciting short introspective answers. If Twitter is "What are you doing?", Plinky is "What do you think about this?"

Current prompts range from making a mixtape of favorite songs to defending your vice. Users compose responses within Plinky using text, images, maps, or other objects that help them craft an answer. Then, those answers can be easily repurposed to other microblogging and blogging services.

But Plinky also manages to provide a venue for social interaction of its own. Users have a stream of responses that are publicly viewable, they can follow other users, and they can favorite responses. Plinky also provides immediate access to other answers to the question you're considering - providing even more sources of inspriration. For a seemingly simple service, there is quite a bit going on.

Louis Gray got an early preview of the service. So if you're interested in more details on all Plinky has to offer, his thorough walkthrough of Plinky provides a solid overview.

In our testing, Plinky proved to be entertaining. The initial prompts are fun, inspiring good crosstalk among Plinky's early adopters. Reading others' responses proved equally compelling.

Whether that interest is sustainable remains to be seen. Facebook has found some of its success by prompting users with an endless barrage of surveys. There's no reason that Plinky can't do the same.

In the long-term, it will be interesting to see what types of users gravitate to the site and continue to return on a daily basis. In the short-term, however, one thing is for certain: with a known entity like Shellen involved, Plinky is sure to develop a rapid following.

Jinni says that its video content is automatically indexed, using a mixture of metadata and reviews. It has a strong semantic technologies component, as it uses a proprietary Natural Language Processing solution to assign semantic tags to content and users. The company claims that this allows Jinni to "rapidly index more titles, becoming the universal catalog for professional video." When it launched in December, Jinni had 10,000 movie, TV and video titles. It also offers APIs for Internet and TV content providers.

In terms of its recommendations philosophy, Jinni believes that a mix of algorithms and human selection is the best solution. Although the initial data set comes from humans entering movie information into a computer, the actual recommendations come from its algorithm - which "can deeply analyze the type of content you like" and hence learn about your tastes in movies. Jinni gives you recommendations by "comparing your Taste Types and the genes of all the titles in our catalog".

Does it Work?

I took Jinni for a test drive, with a search on 'mood'. I quite like an "offbeat" movie on a Friday night, so it was an appropriate place to start. Also 'offbeat' movies like Napoleon Dynamite are the type of films that have caused the Netflix Prize contestants a lot of problems. So I clicked on that mood to see what came up.

The default video selections included ones like Twin Peaks, Donnie Darko, Hot Fuzz, Monty Python, and so on. It was a fairly predictable selection, but where Jinni promises to come into its own is when you filter down. There is a 'Story Tuner', which presented some interesting filter options.

I filtered based on the story tuners (little known, light, realistic, fast-ish) and got recommended a 1990 movie called 'Mr Destiny' starring James Belushi. I can't recall ever seeing it (little known? check!) and while I'm not really a James Belushi fan, it'd be worth a try. I tweaked the light/serious meter up to 'serious' and that gave me a neat selection of 9 films, few of which I'd seen - but they all looked interesting. This is what you want from a recommendation engine - to be told about products you didn't know about before. So Jinni appears to work quite well. There are many other filters other than mood; rating, date, length, plot, genres, and more.

In his review, Chris Gampat concluded that Jinni isn't quite Pandora for movies. That may be true, but we think Jinni is worth a try if you're a movie or tv show buff. It's also similar to ClerkDogs, which we reviewed recently. So if you've tried either or both, let us know in the comments what you thought.

ReadWriteWeb Resources for Recommendation Technologies

We will be profiling other recommendation companies in upcoming posts. We also invite you to explore using our custom ReadWriteWeb Resources:

• RWW Recommendation Industry Feed Favorites OPML file (save link)
• RWW Recommendation Industry Feeds - Best of Feed (copy and paste to your reader)
• Click to preview the above feeds before subscribing (pop-up window)
• RWW Recommendation Site Search (Visit and Bookmark)

Name: Y Combinator
Location: Cambridge, MA and Bay Area, CA
Investment: $5,000 + $5,000 per founder (i.e., $15,000 for two founders, $20,000 for three)
Stake Taken: 2-10% (usually about 6%)
Companies funded: Too many to list (about 58), but many you've heard of, like Reddit, Scribd, and Xobni (Wikipedia has a full list)
Next application deadline: April 2

Name: TechStars
Location: Boulder, CO
Investment: $5,000 per founder, up to $15,000 (3 founders)
Stake Taken: 5%
Companies funded: 9 so far, including Villij, and Intense Debate
Next application deadline: March 31

Name: SeedCamp
Location: London, UK
Investment: 50,000€ (about US$74,000)
Stake Taken: 10%
Companies funded: 6 so far, including Tablefinder
Next application deadline: August 12

Name: YEurope
Location: Vienna, Austria
Investment: 5,000€ per founder, up to 15,000€ (3 founders)
Stake Taken: 2-10%
Companies funded: Soup.io
Next application deadline: None

Name: Summer@Highland
Location: Lexington, MA
Investment: $7,500 for individuals or $15,000 for teams (split evenly)
Stake Taken: ?
Companies funded: 8
Next application deadline: Not yet announced

Name: LaunchBox
Location: Washington, DC
Investment: Between $15,000 and $30,000
Stake Taken: 4-8%
Companies funded: None yet
Next application deadline: March 14

Name: DreamIt Ventures
Location: Philadelphia, PA
Investment: Between $10,000 and $30,000
Stake Taken: 4-8%
Companies funded: None yet
Next application deadline: March 12

Name: Bootup Labs
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada
Investment: ?
Stake Taken: ?
Companies funded: None yet
Next application deadline: None / not yet launched

Name: Bootphase
Location: Atlanta, GA
Investment: ?
Stake Taken: ?
Companies funded: None
Next application deadline: None / Not yet launched

See also: Charles River Ventures' QuickStart loan program, in which seed round startups receive a loan of up to $250,000 against a future Series A venture round (which CRV has the option to participate in). And see the annual Google Summer of Code program, in which stipends are awarded to students working on open source projects.