I just found out that Zemanta has been updated. I had a bit of a mini-review and a discussion with Jure from Zemanta on my blog in June, and they’ve been ironing out some of the difficult bits since. As a very brief intro, Zemanta is a plugin which suggests related items while you blog. It suggests images and related articles to include in the new post, and handles citations for the images you might include.

The updates are about personalisation. It has added suggestions from your own flickr feed, and from “my friends” (from facebook, twitter and mybloglog) so the recommendations you get are now more relevant to you. I’ve installed the update, and will be having a play with the new service at some point, but it doesn’t work on the Nodalities Blog, so I can’t show you any of its features at the moment.

It’s certainly interesting to see these applications being brought to a usable level, and it’s also cool to see the personal-focus being introduced. Andraz Tori, Zemanta’s CTO, wrote about semantic applications in Nodalities Magazine. There are things the Semantic Web community are working towards, but there are also applicable technologies being developed right now