Jure Cuhalev » zemanta

When ReadWriteWeb mentions your Twitter account

Jure Cuhalev — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 15:15:44 +0000

Yesterday two of Twitter accounts I control got mentioned in ReadWriteWeb article 50+ Semantic Web Pros to Follow on Twitter. That’s @zemanta (my company’s account) and @gandalfar (personal twitter).

This allowed me to measure how many new followers I would get as a consequence of this story. Today TweetDeck told me for my personal account:

TweetDeck followers counter

(On quiet days when I’m at home I normally get one or two new followers a day)

What’s more interesting is that of these ~50 people most of them also followed the other account as if they’ve added all of the 50 people on the list.

Anyone else got any experience with having such a rush of new followers?

How to get most out of the conference (tip #1)

Jure Cuhalev — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:19:03 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

Going to conferences is exciting activity, where you get to spend a few days in a completely different environment, around peers listening to exciting people who you most often look up to. But most of trade-show conferences today are not organized like academic conferences where you get to take home a full binder of proceedings that allows you to study the presented material to certain depth and reference it.

There is a very simple trick to keep up with the ideas of smart person on the stage – look up his or hers page and add their blog to your Google Reader. Today’s conference superstars will often blog in great detail about things they present at conferences, post slide-shows and videos of their presentations at other events and link to other people in their field with like minded ideas. If you feel really attached to them, you can also start stalking following them on Twitter or FriendFeed.

The best part of this is – it’s free and it’s easy to incorporate it into your everyday rutine, since you most likely already drink the morning coffee while reading last nights feeds.

T-Shirt sizes distribution for conference

Visualizing books using Zemanta and Wordle

Jure Cuhalev — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 23:31:55 +0000

Most of my readers are by now probably already aware of Wordle, Java applet, that allows neat visualization tags. Given that Zemanta released early alpha API preview recently, I was looking for a fun project to showcase some of it.

So for this experiment I’m going to try to visualize some of the popular classic books, using text files of Gutenberg project. Technical details at the bottom of the post.

Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice as through words and tags

Pride and Prejudice through words

Pride and Prejudice as tags

Herman Melville – Moby-Dick

Moby Dick through words

Moby Dick through tags

George Orwell – 1984

1984 through words

1984 through tags

Technical details

The whole process is done using a simple python script. The script reads in the text file, breaks it into chunks of 360 words, as is roughly one A5 page and then sends it to Zemanta API. It repeats this process for first 30 thousand words of the book. The limit is arbitrary, I just didn’t want to run the script for too long.

Afterward, the text was manually pasted into Wordle and I played with random function and details until I started to like the image. You can also take a look at my full Wordle gallery.

Lessons learned

I’m especially happy how 1984 turned out. For this kind of visualization it’s important to choose source carefuly, so you can get more powerful results that way. I’ll probably continue experimenting with this on 1984 text.

SemanticCamp London, 16-17th 2008

Jure Cuhalev — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 23:29:07 +0000

Source: WikipediaI am going to present the colours of Zemanta this weekend at SemanticCamp in London. Besides showing the latest secret technology we are developing I am also hoping that we can have some interesting debates about usability aspects of the whole thing.

Lengths of article titles [via Zemanta]
More statistics [via Zemanta]

Lessons learned at Barcamp Klagenfurt

Jure Cuhalev — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 12:26:06 +0000

Saturday I visited BarCamp – Sezna Confini 2008, user generated conference, that was organized in Klagenfurt. Besides giving a presentation on Zemanta, I also made some interesting notes from some of the presentations that Iâ€™m sharing below.

In the first session â€œTime & ideas for bloggingâ€, we heard from the authors of So Isses blog. They write a number of blogs and their recommendation is to find a personal routine for blogging, e.g., they like to blog in morning while having their coffee, just writing down ideas as WordPress drafts and then working on them more thoroughly. They also relay heavily on â€œpublish in futureâ€ feature that allows them to time the posts in upcoming days. Right now they are already writing articles for mid-March!

Mathias, on the other hand, talked about Zipfs power law/long tail story. His proposal ist that when youâ€™re analyzing data you plot it on log/log scale and if it shows a linear chart you can start investigating if the data follows the principles. He also presented some statistics about â€œthe bendâ€, the part of at which you start getting exponential growth and your page views start getting . For a lot of online content this is at about 50 users. Check out his presentation.

Max talked about Blogs and their connectivity. There are about 800 new german blogs per day. Some services like blogfever.de, blogrush.com scan the content that you are reading and then locate similiar content to your blog.

He tried to design his own widget using yahoo term extractor. Problem with this approach is that when you take your tags, enter the into google blog search and you will get only one article – your own. Until you remove and suddenly you get 10k articles. This problem is same for google adwords, 95% of tags are not matching close enough. Too few or too many results.
He also created a cool project called Blogsvision.com, that plots blogs on Google maps and connections between them. His experience is that 6-degrees for separation is not working for blogs. Some blogs are totally separated from others in their own islands.

Zemanta Penguins

Jure Cuhalev — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 07:25:20 +0000

After successful presentation at the Investors day, we had a nice evening out in the city. One of the venues we visited was the “Absolut Ice Bar London“. The idea is very simple, have a bar that is whole under ice and serve some nice cocktails to visitors, even though it sounded a bit more sensible in the context of Kiruna , one of the coldest places in Sweden.

Experience itself is not bad, even though the place is a bit small in the end, and you’re not allowed to be in there more than half an hour. You also get some cool penguin like coat to keep you warm. Sadly though, the toilets were not part of the ice covered area, so nothing really innovative in this field.

In general it is a nice experience to try as part of the night out in the city with a group of friends to have fun of the glasses made of ice and each other in funny coat.

(images blurred to protect the innocent, and because my mobile phone doesn’t take good photos)

5 Web events in London worth visiting

Jure Cuhalev — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 02:09:06 +0000

One of the perks of living in such a big city as London are all the interesting events a Web developer/entrepreneurÂ can easily visit. Even if you do not live there, it is still worth timing your visit so you can visit them.

MiniBarÂ occurs monthly where a number of startups pitch their ideas to the visiting public, with general theme towards WebÂ entrepreneurs. Every presenting company gets asked the hardest question: how do you make money?

Event is free, but registration is required at their homepage.Â

Wiki WednesdaysÂ are also monthly event, this time, as you might have guessed, oriented towards people who use and are passionate about Wiki’s.Â Even though a lot of participants are involved with Wikipedia,Â there is also a lot of buzz around usage of wikis in corporations and in other projects.
Event is free, but registration is required in their wiki, that can be found through their portal.

London OpenCoffee Meetup, is a weekly event for anyone more interested inÂ entrepreneurialÂ side of Online and Web business. There are all kinds of visitors there, from VC’s to developers or just people who are interested in breaking into this field or looking for someone to help them. Drinking coffee on top of Waterstones, Londons biggest book store and chatting with like minded people is also a great way to start a Thursday morning.
Event is free, with no registration required. They also have a homepage and a general page of OpenCoffee Club movement.

Dorkbot London is a monthly meeting of people who do interesting things with electricity, but more precisely electronic. It involves artists, engineers, designers and just about everyone who is passionate about all things electric.
Event is free, but sometimes registration is required, so check their dorkbot wiki.

Mashup* event is a monthly, a bit more commercially oriented event where startups once again present their creations to interested public. Since it is not free, there is a bit smaller crowd there so it might be easier to actually discuss your big idea.
Entry is 35Â£, with required registration at the event homepage.

Bubble video

Jure Cuhalev — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 17:14:40 +0000

These three months that I worked intesively with Zemanta felt a lot similiar to what, I imagined, in pre-.com crash times was. Shipping your core team to distant, yet cool place; provide insane amounts of yaffa cakes and cedevita, accompanied with either great in-house cooking or take-aways. The whole thing is then well rounded with some (for now) quiet hyping and talking to different potential investors and users at different conferences and trade shows.

Because of all this, and my overall tendency to like all Web 2.0-ish, I found the following music video from Richter Scales especially funny; at the same time I’m also hoping that we can sustain this hype for a while since I really think that the tech that it’s currently in the labs should be shown to the world and not lost due to “bubble” bursting.

Visiting Evento Blog EspaÃ±a in Sevilla, Spain

Jure Cuhalev — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 01:03:40 +0000

This weekend I will be visiting Evento Blog EspaÃ±a conference in Seville, Spain to show Zemanta ‘s technology to local bloggers and gather feedback. If you are at the conference or live nearby and would like to see some automatic contextual matching for your blog, drop me a mail at jure – at – zemanta.com.

Zemanta shopping

Jure Cuhalev — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 03:55:46 +0000

Living at Zemanta HQ in London is always a fun event. A couple weeks ago we went online shopping for groceries. These are a couple of photos that happened during this process. Even though it was quite fun, we since decided that is much better for our recreation if we bring things ourselves from nearby supermarket.