Webware

A new social site for music discovery called WorldSings has launched and to celebrate that, it has also announced that it will award $1 million in prizes to users who participate in its World's Best Song Competition.

According to the company, WorldSings will combine artists and music fans to create an environment where they can interact with each other and share music. The site is open to any musician or band performing original music and fans can vote for their favorite songs. The bands who recorded the top 20 most popular songs will be sent to Las Vegas to compete at the WorldSings concert at Planet Hollywood on March 19, 2010. The winning band will take home $500,000. Meantime, bands and users can sign up for WorldSings now for free.

Zemanta, a tool that finds information from across the Web to help users add relevant information to a blog post, announced Thursday that it has added support for Safari, Chrome, and Opera, to join its current support for Firefox and Internet Explorer. Once a user registers for Zemanta, it will work with the new browsers as a bookmarklet, constantly searching for related images and content, and allowing the blogger to add those to his or her post in a single click.

Kijiji.com, a free, local classifieds Web site, has unveiled a new feature that will allow users to post their new classified ads on Twitter and Facebook. According to the company, users will be able to add their ads to Facebook or Twitter in one click from the main Kijiji page.

DriverSide, a company that provides car information to help owners find the true value of their vehicles, announced Thursday that it has secured $5.3 million in a Series B round of funding led by Allegis Capital. Allegis executive, Bob Ackerman, will also be joining the DriverSide board of directors.

Video site Hulu announced on Monday that it will stream President Barack Obama's first formal press conference Monday night at 5 p.m. PST. According to the company, the live stream will run until its conclusion and then it will be made available for streaming on the site thereafter.

Blogger Brandon Kraft says he found a new feature in the Google Apps version of Google Calendar. According to Kraft, users can now attach files from Google Docs and photos from Google's Picasa to any event in the calendar. Google has yet to comment on the find.

OneSpot, a company that offers widgets for Web site owners that contain relevant news articles from across the Web, announced Monday that it has raised $4.2 million in a Series A round of funding that was led by Silver Creek Ventures. According to the company, it plans to use the funding to "expand the reach of its subscription-based Web service" and increase its ad monetization.

7 Billion People, a company that offers Web analytics data to Web publishers, announced Monday that it raised $3 million in a round of funding that was led by SmithCo Investments. According to the company, it will use its funding to bolster its sales and marketing departments and focus on revenue generation.

Desktop blog editor, ScribeFire, has partnered with Zemanta, a content discovery tool, in the latest version of the software, Mashable is reporting. According to the report, Zemanta can be opened from the ScribeFire toolbar and offers recommendations for related articles as the blog post is being created. It also allows registered users to add favorite sources to make it more personalized. The new ScribeFire is available now.

Zemanta, a very useful utility that makes blog posts easier to write, is now setting its sights on Web e-mail. Its browser plug-in, which works with both Firefox and Internet Explorer, has been updated to do the same thing in both Gmail and Yahoo's Web mail.

Once installed, you just hit a button in your Web mail client and the tool goes through what you're written for related links and content worth adding. It's very fast at doing this, even if your message is on the long side. In my case, a three paragraph e-mail took less than five seconds to be processed, and Zemanta came up with ten different suggested links that could be automatically added to my message.

The images that you can insert into your e-mails come from various places, but I found the most helpful option to be Flickr. You can plug in your user name and it goes through any shots you've taken (assuming you've named them) and lets you easily insert them. For instance, in my e-mail I had referenced going to the de Young museum in San Fransisco, and it pulled up both photos from the Web and my Flickr shots from the weekend in question.

I look at this as a fantastic way to make e-mails to friends and family a little more accessible. If you don't feel like going back after writing to plug in links for things that might need explaining, there's a good chance the tool has already prepared them for you.

Here's a demo of how it works in Gmail. There's also a video of it working in Yahoo mail after the break.

Hot on the heels of Monday's look at Apture, competitor Zemanta has pushed out an update to include several new publishing platforms--one of them being MySpace, a site with over 100 million registered users. It's a good bet a chunk of those active users are taking advantage of the service's built-in blogging tool instead of going to another service like WordPress or LiveJournal.

Once installed, writing a blog post on the popular social network can be sped up if you take advantage of its auto-linking, tagging, and image finding capabilities.

The core service still remains largely the same, but Tuesday morning the re-blog feature, which was introduced early last month, has been tweaked. Re-blogging someone else's post using Zemanta is now a one-click effort, down from a small series of menus. It also better integrates with Tumblr, one of the new publishing platforms introduced Tuesday from which the feature was already borrowed and uses the same large quotation marks to set off what you're pulling from a source. This will also show up better in feed readers, where it would previously not be set apart from regular blog musings.

Other services added besides MySpace and Tumblr include Ning and Drupal--the latter requiring the use of a plug-in which works the same way as the ones for WordPress and MovableType.

Make MySpace blogging a quicker affair with Zemanta, which adds links and photos from the Web for you.

(Credit: Zemanta Ltd.)

Apture is a new tool for bloggers to add a little more context to their posts. Like Yahoo's Shortcuts it will go over what you've written and add little pop-ups in places where you link to other sites or media items from around the Web. The big difference is that Apture can either do all this automatically or let you to do the legwork.

It's set up to work with popular sites like Flickr, Amazon, Wikipedia, and Scribd. Any link to one of those sites will simply enable whoever clicks on it to see the entire entry in a small expanding pop-up window that can either stay affixed to the link text or be dragged around the page like a floating widget. The effect is actually pretty neat--and manages to keep your readers on the page, even if you've got a heap of linked items. If you want to manually link up any word or phrase in your post you simply highlight it, and you'll be given a huge list of items from photos, videos, audio clips and text links to link straight to it without using copy and paste or your CMS.

The site debuted back in mid-April with something called "the experience" which is basically what anyone can now do to their blogs. (Check it out here.) Supported are all the usual suspects like WordPress, TypePad, and Blogger. There are also simple script plug-ins for maybe some of the lesser known publishing tools like Tumblr, Ning, and Blogsome. The install itself is just a line of JavaScript no matter what platform you're on.

What makes it a standout compared to some other services that do this is that each Apture link can be picked from a multitude of places. For instance, in my test account on a Tumbr blog I linked up a mention of Google Maps with a link to the service. I was also able to expand on that with a related media section that let me add all sorts of other items like the Wikipedia entry, a YouTube video, and a large screenshot. All of these things could be seen without me having to add additional links, and as a reader you can see all of this without venturing off my post.

Another service that does this without some of the eye candy pop-ups is Zemanta which I really enjoyed using. As I mentioned back when I reviewed it, tools like these make blogging far easier while simultaneously making the end product a richer experience as long as these pop-up links are used with some restraint. I think the last thing anybody wants when reading a blog post is to have things flying around the screen, which is why I hope Apture's key improvements in the future include giving the readers a quick way to disable some of the eye candy that can make tools like this distracting instead of useful.

Check out the walkthough video of how to use the tool below.

One of blogging's biggest barriers is how much work you have to do to get a post out the door. You can stick to straight text, but adding links, pictures, tags, and related stories makes it more engaging for your readers. But let's face it, doing all that on every post is time consuming. In fact, the length of time required to write a decent blog post is what spawned services like Tumblr and Twitter--the ultimate lazy man's blogging tools.

Enter Zemanta, a brilliant product for lazy or otherwise time-focused bloggers who simply don't want to spend extra time looking up related links, tracking down properly licensed photos, or coming up with tags for what they're writing. The tool plugs into all the popular blogging platforms and will scan over whatever you've written and provide a bevy of related links. These links don't just go on a dump at the end of your post though, it'll spot mentions within the post and give you the option to add a URL to the first mention from a handful of popular sites. This works for company and celebrity names; it will also pick up on simple domains like anything with a .com at the end.

Another tool that does this to a certain extent is Yahoo Shortcuts, which we looked at back in December of last year. The big difference between Zemanta and Shortcuts is that it's not just Yahoo content--it comes from all over the Web. Zemanta COO Bostjan Spetic tells me the tool is pulling in links from a live index of 600 blogs which have been picked from multiple ranking sites, including Technorati. In addition to that listing, it's also pulling in another 400 popular news and entertainment sites like CNN.com and The New York Times.

Tired of adding links to blogs or finding pictures? Check out Zemanta, a tool that goes through your post to find tags, links, pictures and more.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Maybe one of Zemanta's coolest features is that it gives you freely-licensed photos you can drop into your posts (see the screenshot above). It will automatically pull them in from Flickr if they've been given the proper Creative Commons usage rights. You can sort through them and just stick them into your post. Spetic tells me he's working on deals with a few stock photo services to let bloggers grab beautiful stock photography for free. The photos will be limited in size, but bloggers are free to use them on their posts as long as they link back to the shot's product page.

This morning the company is unveiling a handful of new features including re-blogging, a feature that Spetic admits has been "borrowed" from nanoblogging service Tumblr. With it enabled, other bloggers with Zemanta installed can take your entire post and quote it on their own blog. Each post automatically comes with proper attribution linking back to the post, but they can make small changes too.

Also new is a popularity page highlighting the most linked to or mentioned content on Zemanta networked blogs. Spetic says it's not a competitor to sites like TechMeme, and instead is just a simple way to see what's getting the most chatter. Eventually, Spetic says the tracker will be spun off into different sections so that people can monitor areas of news that interest them the most. Spetic also told me it might become a tracker for other conversation mediums that will become Zemanta-enabled, like blog comments and forum posts.

For now, Zemanta works on all the major blogging platforms. There are also Firefox and IE extensions that let you get the same handy tool without having to install it on your blog. Users can also give it a spin on this demo page and get the same results. Once Zemanta is installed, users see a similar interface, but with a tighter integration into a blogging tool's existing tag and image libraries. To see the tool in action, check out the demo, or simply watch the video below.