ReadWriteWeb

Pop-up info windows: someone had to do it right, right? After years of pushy, worthless little window overlays that pop up when you hover over a link, there are now a number of companies trying to offer bloggers and their readers a whole lot of value in what could be a handy format.

Below we briefly review two of these services, Apture and Zemanta's Balloons. Is this kind of product really worth using? Once you add a pop-up of someone's LinkedIn profile next to their name as you type it, you may never want to go back to not having a tool like this at your disposal.

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.

Zemanta, the blogging tool which harnesses semantic technology to add relevant content to your posts, has just released a major upgrade to their service. This new release allows you specify the sources you want to see in the suggestions list that Zemanta provides. You can now incorporate your own social networks, RSS feeds, and photos from your Flickr account into your blog posts. This makes Zemanta a lot more appealing to established bloggers who are in less need of suggestions and more in need of automation.

Zemanta is a an interesting European startup that is applying semantic technologies to blogging. Sarah Perez covered the company's launch in March. One can think of Zemanta as an auto-complete function for blogging. As you are typing up a new post, Zemanta's browser plugin fetches related content - images, articles, videos, links - and provides a simple and friendly UI for inserting the related content into your blog. We caught up with Andraz Tori, CTO and co-founder of Zemanta, at the SemTech conference at San Jose last week for an interview.