Technology and Making

Image via CrunchBase

About a month ago, off the back of a tip in yet another 10 Ways to Improve Your Traffic post, I installed the Zemanta plugin. The developers call it a "point and click enrichment" tool for blogs and email.

In practice, Zemanta is a set of toolbars which merge themselves into your composition page (in my case Blogger's "Create Post" page) as it loads, and give you access to various sources of information semantically relevent to your post (or email - but I'm going to stop mentioning the email because I don't use it. I'm sure it's useful to someone though).

Definitely the most fun is the image search, which presents a three-by-three grid of suggested images which can be embedded in your post with one click - they're selected from a variety of sources and are either fully free, available to use under the Creative Commons license or potentially covered by Fair Use.

This is a very useful resource for me - great for topping off my posts with an appropriate image where I don't have one of my own, without wading through pages of image searches and wrangling with licensing issues.

Below the image search is, to me, the heart of Zemanta - a scrolling list of relevent links. What I particularly like is that the links can be from major newspapers, top-dollars sites or relatively obscure blogs, as long as they're relevent. Clicking on one adds it to a "Related Articles by Zemanta" box at the bottom of your post.

This is a really useful tool, and I always try to include at least one of Zemanta's suggested links in my posts - and there generally is at least one that's directly relevent and good material. I like that it promotes connectivity between blogs with a minimum of effort, enhancing my content, letting me offer my readers more quality material and share some clicks with other writers who deserve the attention.

Zemanta also suggests links to embed in posts - often just a Wikipedia page, but also homepages of companies you've mentioned and other useful resources for when you want to make a quick reference without having to explain a whole chunk of background - and suggests tags too.



The plugin keeps updating and expanding all these resources as you type and it refines its categorisation of your post. On the whole it's pretty smart - I usually find a good header image, a relevent link or two, and at least a couple of my tags generally come from Zemanta.

Best of all, the Zemanta resource database is (so far) human-edited and open to all - based on the instructions on their website I wrote an email directly to their Community Manager (and what a strange, archaic thing that seemed, contacting a human being directly!) and got a very friendly and interested email back in a few days saying that my blogs had been added to their database, and wishing me all the best.

I can see that human-human relationship being very hard to maintain as Zemanta grows bigger and is besieged with spam, but for now it was a very nice welcome to the network.

And having my blogs on Zemanta has already brought me a little trickle of traffic - two of my Cloud Computing articles were linked in the footer of a recent post on a well-trafficked technology blog, and my foodblog post on Morels got linked, oddly enough, by an Iowa-based outdoorsman's blog!

Whether or not you ask to be added to the main database, you can easily add your own content feeds, Flickr, Facebook and other resources to your own Zemanta interface to easily crosslink your posts and share links.

There are still a few things missing from Zemanta which I'd find really useful - the main issue being that all my photos are in Picasa which is not yet supported, but on the whole this has become a seamless and very positive addition to my blogging tools. If you're a blogger, I'd highly recommend you give it a try - and the more people who join, the richer and more powerful the network gets. Good web technology in a nutshell.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Zemanta - For Fast, Efficient Blogging (toolsforjournalists.blogspot.com)
• Zemanta - Is Worth a Second Look (agingreluctantly.com)

Labels: Blog, blogging, crosslinking, Flickr, links, semantic, Web 2.0, Zemanta

So, what are the most interesting features of today's online file storage providers?

Automatic Syncing

The old method of offsite storage was to add files to a queue which would then be (slowly) transferred to your online repository. The user would have to monitor the files in transfer, often restart the process if the connection was lost, and if a file changed it had to be added to the queue again. Most modern online storage hosts provide software which automatically synchronises your computer with the net - you simply check off whichever folders you want synced, and the software will work away in the background uploading all the files for you. If you edit, remove or add to the files in a synced folder, those changes will be automatically passed on to the online version. If the connection is lost in the middle of a transfer, the software can often resume the process without having to start that file all over again.

Mount Your Storage like a Hard Drive

Many of the major online file hosts now offer the ability to hook up your storage just as though it was a hard drive. This gives you easy access to your stored files using your file browser, without having to go through a webpage or load up a dedicated program. More importantly, it allows your computer to work with the space as thought it was just another drive, so you can use your preferred tools to work with your data.

Sequential Backups

If the software you use to access your online storage offers sequential backups, you can upload only the files (or even parts of files) which have changed since the last upload. This saves a considerable amount of bandwidth if you are working with very large files or regularly editing large amounts of data.

Versioning

Some online hard drives (mostly those offering sequential backups) now offer versioning on smaller files (like text documents and spreadsheets) - when you upload a new copy, the system keeps track of what has been changed and allows you to access older versions in case of corruption or user error.

File Sharing

With file sharing capability, you can select any file you have uploaded and create a download link to send to another user, usually without requiring them to sign up or install any software themselves.

Multiple Users and Access Controls

Sometimes offered only to paying subscribers, these features allow you to give other users access to different parts of your online storage. Access control means that you can determine how much access a given user has (view-only, read and write, no deletions etc.) and to which files and folders specifically.

Interconnectivity

The most exciting potential of online file storage solutions, and what really makes them part of the Cloud, is the possibility of interconnecting with other online services. Image files in your internet hard drive can be shared in online galleries like Flickr and Photobucket or ordered as prints, videos can be embedded in pages or shared via sites like YouTube, audio files can be streamed or embedded, and so on. The possibilities of interconnectivity are expanding every day, and will be a large part of the power of the Cloud in future.

Next post: Interesting Players in Online Storage

Labels: access control, Computers, File sharing, Flickr, online file storage, online hard drive, photobucket, sequential backup, synchronisation, versioning, Web 2.0, youtube

"Cloud Computing" is becoming one of the biggest buzzphrases on the Net, eclipsing the dreaded "Web 2.0" as a popular metaphor for the cutting edge in internet technology. But what does it really mean, and how can it benefit you?

Cloud computing is, in essence, just a step further in the development of worldwide computer networking. It's the process by which your data, and even your applications, are moved "online" (ie away from your desktop) into the "cloud", the mass of resources available to you on the internet.

Cloud computing has actually been possible since the development of the first modem. In fact, early networked computer systems were closer to cloud computing than our modern day desktop setup. Data and applications were stored and run centrally on huge mainframe computers, and users connected to them with a very simple "dumb terminal" which was too low-powered to run programs by itself, and merely took keyboard input from the user to the mainframe and brought back text to display on its screen. The terminal might be connected directly to the mainframe, or over a phone line using a modem.

Over time, desktop terminals became Personal Computers, capable of running their own programs, storing increasingly large quantities of data and in time becoming thousands of times more powerful than their room-filling mainframe predecessors. Mainframe computing became largely obsolete.

But now, as the internet has become ubiquitous, storage capacities in bytes-to-the-buck have increased exponentially and very high speed net connections have become widely available and affordable, the offsite/centralised approach to computing has become practical and interesting again under the name of Cloud Computing. Google, with their millions of highspeed servers and vast data storage facilities (and most of all the fact that they give most of their services away for free) have pushed the field forward dramatically.

In this series of articles I'll explain some of the practicalities of cloud computing as it stands in 2009, and give examples and how-tos of how you can use CC in your work and life. I'll address some of the concerns and limitations of the technology, and cover some of the exciting possibilities which will be opening up in the future.

Labels: Cloud computing, Computer, Computer data storage, Google, Personal computer, Web 2.0