I’ve long been impressed with the rich-media popup tool Apture. If you’re actually on my site and not reading this in a feed reader, you can see the little book icon in the previous sentence. Hover over it and you’ll see a Wikipedia entry I selected to appear here. It was really easy to do using the Apture plug-in for WordPress.

Last week semantic web company Zemanta released a very similar but open source program called Balloons. I’m going to try to install that next here and compare the two services. Alex Iskold got me thinking about it. (Oh wow, look at that double LinkedIn and Twitter pop-up – that is awesome! I hate reading peoples’ names online and not being able to see where they work. This is great.)

So far Apture is pretty impressive. I did the wrong thing with it a couple of times, but I think I’ve got it down now. This post will evolve as I find the time to try out Zemanta.

Here's how a link I added to an RWW post about Zemanta looks....in Apture!

Ok, Zemanta plug-in now installed. The company says the Balloons feature is automatically included. Let’s see.

Update: You can’t really use both at the same time on the same blog – Apture hijacks all of Zemanta’s balloon links. You probably won’t be able to see Zemanta links now, but I’ll be posting a full comparative review of the two services tonight or tomorrow on ReadWriteWeb.

Test: Pablo Picasso

Related articles by Zemanta

• Introducing Balloons: Free multimedia overlays for bloggers (zemanta.com)
• Zemanta Gives Bloggers Balloons (centernetworks.com)

1. Find story idea
2. Reach out to sources for info
3. Research online using various magic research tools, while I wait for sources to get back to me
4. Stop and think
5. Talk to sources, maybe research some more based on what they say
6. Write!

All of that needs to get done in two hours, tops. Two or three times a day. When I can master that, with quality written output, then I will feel like I’ve made big, big progress in my work.

Several of those steps tend to get under-prioritized or put in the wrong order in my current workflow. Reaching out to sources right away and researching while I wait for them to respond is what really needs to get turned into a new routine. Thoughts? Ideas? Suggestions?

Hello dear readers and thanks for stopping by again.  I’ve decided I’m going to try and make some changes to this, my personal blog.  Every day I write two or three blog posts over at ReadWriteWeb. They tend to be long and somewhat formal.  I have a lot of little thoughts in my head, though, and some that aren’t really appropriate for RWW.  So I’ve decided to change my personal blog from a seldom-updated site to highlight my (still available, but limited) consulting work into a place where I can share small thoughts with anyone who wants to read and discuss them.  I’ll probably share some long-term RWW article ideas here too, so we can discuss those projects I’m researching over time.

I might post a little tutorial type post here now and again as I used to do, but I expect it will mostly be ruminations on the web, on tech writing and on where it all seems like it’s going.  I hope you enjoy it.  I’m excited, I’ve been itching for an outlet like this for awhile.

OpenID community leader Scott Kveton noticed this morning that his Twitter profile page is now the #1 search result in Google for his last name, not his blog. This is something TechCrunch reported on earlier this month, but people are just starting to wrap their heads around it. I know I want this blog to remain the #1 search result for my name, not my Twitter profile.

In a conversation on FriendFeed, Ben Hedrington pointed out that in addition to the page title change that TechCrunch reported on – Twitter also uses the rel=”me” markup and Kveton’s blog does not. I looked and realized that my blog here doesn’t either!

So the long and short of this story is that if you want to make sure that Google understands your blog to be your primary beacon on the web, then you should add the words rel=”me” to a relevant link on your blog. I’ve added that tag to the link on my sidebar that goes to my feedback page, because that’s a good page for me. It’s as simple as making the link text read a href=”http://marshallk.com/feedback” rel=”me”.

That may not solve the entire problem but it should help and it’s good form. Machine readable microformats like rel=”me” are likely to be an increasingly important part of the web in the future. Would readers here suggest otherwise? If I’m reading too much into this, let me know.