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.

Apture

We started by testing out Apture's WordPress plug-in (on my personal blog) and were very happy with the results. It takes just a few minutes to install, and learning to use it is quite intuitive. We wrote an extensive review of Apture in February.

Pros:

• It's beautiful. From the admin section to the pop-up windows, design has been emphasized at Apture.


• Lots of user control. The amount of control users have over what's included in their pop-ups is amazing. You can choose between assets with a few clicks, or you can pick out start and end timestamps in an embedded YouTube video. The list of options is big and keeps getting bigger, as evidenced by the recent addition of really nice LinkedIn and Twitter profile options.


• You can now include multiple tabs in one link, making it easy to pack a lot of information inside.


• The user experience is solid, and the product is pretty well baked.

Cons:

• Apture is proprietary software offered by one company, unlike Zemanta's standards-based offering, which was built as part of a consortium of developer- and community-minded companies.


• Sometimes it hangs on the UI. We found one bug that the company has since fixed, but pop-up loading is sometimes slower than we'd like.

Zemanta

Zemanta is a feature-rich service for bloggers and has a great API that developers can use to automatically discover keywords in bodies of text in lots of different scenarios. You should check it out. It's quite easy to use. Last week the company released a feature that competes with Apture, called Balloons. Balloons is now automatically included in the blogging plug-in from Zemanta, which is very easy to get started with.

To be frank, we would recommend installing the core Zemanta plug-in for the rest of its features but using Apture for info pop-ups instead. The way the two products are administered is very different; Zemanta detects key concepts in the text of your post and suggests Balloon links you can add with a click. You're limited to adding just those handful of Balloons; you can't link up just any text you want.

Pros:

• Zemanta is open source and standards-based. It feels good to use.


• Zemanta works with the rest of the tech community and has some awesome tools for supporting non-profit organizations. Did we mention that it feels good to use Zemanta?


• The auto-detection of key concepts -- just click on the buttons and they're linked to resources -- makes Zemanta a little bit faster to use than Apture. It takes fewer clicks.

Cons:

• This tool isn't nearly as pretty. In fact, the pop-ups are almost the opposite of pretty.


• You have far less control over the sources of information you can include. Zemanta's Balloons is tied to the ambitious CommonTags standards effort and apparently does not include anything outside the world of standards. That's noble but limiting.


• Most of the links Zemanta inserts are to FreeBase, which is like a machine-readable version of Wikipedia but also a noble, well-funded mess. Thus the pop-ups you get from Zemanta are quite hit and miss.


• There are Amazon affiliate ads in the Zemanta product; Apture's business strategy appears to be to serve bloggers for free and ad-free and charge big publishers to white-label the service. Zemanta's Amazon ads might get on your nerves.


• This is a very early product, having just launched last week. We hope it is further developed.

That's our experience so far with these tools. If you've tried either or both, we'd love to know about your experience as well.

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.

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.

That's because the challenge for established bloggers isn't knowing where to link or what content to add, it's the tedious process involved in having to do so. What these bloggers needed was a more personal recommendation system...one that would suggest articles and images that actually meant something to them. Now that's exactly what Zemanta delivers thanks to the addition of four new features: My Friends, My Feeds, My Pictures, and Filtering.

New Features in Zemanta

My Friends

In the new version, bloggers can connect Zemanta with their social networks. At launch time, those networks include Twitter, Facebook, and MyBlogLog, but more may be added in the future. This feature lets you automatically insert links to your friends' social network profiles when you write about them in your blog post.

My Feeds

In order to provide you with more relevant content to link to, Zemanta's new version lets you import feeds from your feed reader as opposed to just simply suggesting "popular" content from top blogs. This way, you can link to your friends and to the other blogs you read instead of just to those sites that have the most "authority." You can add feeds one-by-one by entering either the feed link or blog URL or you can import an entire OPML file.

My Pictures & Filtering

With My Pictures, Zemanta can connect to your own Flickr account to give you instant access to your own photos. This can be combined with the new filtering feature to help you locate the images or other content you need. For example, if you had just attended the DEMO conference, you could enter the keyword "demo" in the box provided to retrieve photos from that event.

You can see the new features in action in the video below:

Zemanta works via a browser add-on (IE or Firefox), a server-side plugin (WordPress, MT, or Drupal), or as a plug-in for Windows Live Writer. It supports all major blogging platforms including WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Tumblr, Drupal, Ning, and MySpace.

Although we had liked Zemanta in concept, this latest upgrade makes it far more useful as it incorporates the things that matter the most to you: your friends, your photos, your feeds. We expect to now see Zemanta used much more heavily by everyday bloggers who are looking to save time and add more specific content to posts.

All of these algorithms are running on a scalable, distributed grid, powered by Amazon Web Services. After meeting with Tori, we instantly knew why Zemanta won a Red Herring 100 award this year in Europe - not only are Tori and his team doing some amazing work, there is a wonderful story and passion behind the company.

RWW: What is your background?

Andraz Tori: I started programming at age of 10 and have been successful at international programming competitions in high school. I went to study computer science, however always did some things in parallel. For example, I had a 5-year detour as TV host on Slovenian national television and established a successful computer center in Ljubljana. I always look for how to improve life with technology and decided to go entrepreneurial when seeing an interesting opportunity on how to do it on a large scale.

What is it like to be a tech startup in Europe?

It's fun. It's hard. But that is even more rewarding when you overcome the challenges. Seedcamp (a UK competition inspired by Y Combinator) was a great boost for European early stage ventures and for us too. It is fun trying to bring a startup culture to Slovenia, a country that is not really used to it.

How did Zemanta get started?

We've seen that local TV house was providing all their video production on the Internet. Naturally Google could not understand and index them. We discovered that TV house had subtitles for all the shows and wrote a program to automatically create web pages that are automatically indexed and then point people to the right videos. That was too easy so we added a bunch of natural language processing and automatically connected those pages to other stories on TV portal and to Wikipedia. Now full blown web pages were created automagically. We sold this solution for pocket change and then realized that it is actually a very unique product - like nothing else out there! Then we (with co-founder Bostjan Spetic) realized that this amazing technology works on the language that only two million people speak. So we decided to go international and applied to Seedcamp. There we got first seed funding and later proper seed round from UK investors.

What is the main idea behind Zemanta?

When dealing with secretary, do you instruct her how to do every single detail or do you tell her approximately what you want, wait for result and just correct it if there are any the mistakes? We use computers today in the first way, while at Zemanta we believe it should be more of the second. Zemanta applies that idea to content creation. When author writes initial text, the service analyzes it and suggests how it can be improved.

Right now it suggests images to add, related articles, tags and in-text links. All this unobtrusively and implemented via slick interface. The better the computer understands the text and its context, the more it can help you write it. That's the idea behind Zemanta. Right now we are applying it to bloggers (via plug-ins for Firefox and Internet Explorer so they work even on hosted platforms) and we also are planning to open up an API.

How does your product use semantic technologies?

When doing our analysis we need to connect pieces of text to their semantic meaning. When suggesting tags we need to know their semantic neighborhood. But all this stays in background, the user never sees the magical semantic hand which is hidden behind simple and slick user interface. Because we find out what parts of text are about, we are able to create correct semantic markup that helps pages to get better visibility in semantic search engines or applications such as Yahoo! SearchMonkey.

What is Zemanta's architecture and use of Amazon Web Services?

Deep processing of text is a processor intensive task. You need to make it scalable, AWS EC2 is the right answer. We created our own high-availability high-performance solution that makes sure service is kept alive and well. All existing solutions only map well to classical web server + SQL server combination. We also use S3 for backups and some SimpleDB. AWS (and similar services) make life easier for startups. However you need to design your systems to be 'cloudable' from the start.

What are your goals for the rest of 2008 and beyond?

Simple, be the best utility service for bloggers in 2008. Get bloggers on board so they tell us what they want from the 'smart' service. Then provide more functionality and benefits from using Zemanta and provide an API to early adopters that want to integrate it in their own CMS or other types of applications.

Beyond 2008, we envision suggestion service so helpful that the experience becomes ubiquitously expected. In a few years you will want it whenever you will create content - be it writing a blog post, or using word processor or even in your email client. Users are going to expect computers to understand their intentions better. And help with good, insightful, directly usable suggestions. Zemanta is going to provide that service to large many of them via different delivery methods.

What companies are competing with you in the space? What other Semantic Web companies do you find interesting?

You could create Zemanta experience if you pulled different companies' products together. But we are the only one having a rounded product, not just API and not just one or two types of suggestions. You could find parts of Zemanta experience in Sphere, Calais, BlogRovr, Watson, etc.

I am a big fan of Cyc and Metaweb and hope people will build wonders on the foundations those two companies are building. I am also interested in Powerset and Twine which both could become very important if/when they make it into the mainstream.

What is one insight, business or technical, that you want to share with our readers?

Developing diverse skills pays off. And doing things with your whole heart always means an interesting journey, even when you end up at different place than you initially expected.