This post was written by Liz Brady
Zemanta is an amazing service - really takes a lot of the slog out of blogging by suggesting links, which saves a lot of time researching them and entering them into the HTML or entry box on your blog. Very valuable for bloggers as it means you can post more quickly and with richer content that search engines will love because of all the links you can put in. You realize that all the hype about semantic web technologies is cool, but it’s always a great user experience that paves the way forward.
Hakia’s ScoopBar looks like a standard search toolbox, but it is more than that. Not only can it highlight the most query-related sentence on the pages, it can also capture a portion of the text and save it to your computer as HTML files for future reference. And of course, not to mention the ability to open the files captured from the toolbar itself. You can search the Web using the hakia ScoopBar embedded in your browser. This one definitely saves time, but it supports searches from hakia only.
Hakia is currently in beta testing but the site is available to the Web public with some of the explanation of their endeavors apparent in the hakia labs section. One of the most difficult aspects of new technology is the “explanation” of the technology. This is particularly true for hakia as the heart of the engine is comprised of advanced mathematics, linguistics, semantics, artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic. Hakia’s indexing system is far more diverse and effective than Google’s in that it responds more quickly and is not constrained to a linear index system.
AdaptiveBlue´s BlueOrganizer, one such site incorporating the semantic web approach, is a Firefox plug-in which understands what a page is about; because it is able to comprehend the contents of a site, it can automatically retrieve related info from other sites. Bluemarks, or BlueOrganizer bookmarks can be easily shared across the web with friends and family. Your Bluemarks can be organized into Bluebadges, widgets which can be placed in your blog or profile to share your bookmarks. AdaptiveBlue is seriously one cool plug-in.
BooRah is a crowd-sourced restaurant review site along the lines of Yelp (review) and Zagat (review) but with a couple of differences. BooRah pulls in reviews from other sites like CitySearch, Insider Pages and Yahoo Reviews. It performs a structural and semantic analysis of the review text and extracts whether the reviewer is expressing a negative (Boo) or positive (Rah). Unlike Yelp, Boorah seems very good at accurately locating the closest restaurants to a specific address, zip code or intersection. BooRah reviews tend to be somewhat dry and factual.
TripIt application helps in organizing your trip in an easy and simple to read format. All you have to do is forward all your confirmation and reservation emails. You can also add and subtract details as you will. The only downside is that it doesn’t remind the user to print out itinerary or to access via mobile phone! If the user forgets to make a printout he or she will have to spend the beginning of trip getting directions.