SmartLinking
I link to music all the time on this blog. But what music service do I link to? Amazon mostly because its the most ubiquitous. Most everyone knows how to use Amazon. But I also am a huge fan of last.fm, hypemachine, rhapsody, pandora, and many more music services. Maybe one of those is your favorite. Maybe you'd prefer I link to them instead.
Enter SmartLinks.
SmartLinks bring semantic understanding to the most basic element of the web - the link. It's way easier to understand a smart link by seeing it than talking about it. Some of you might have noticed this link yesterday on my MP3 of the Day post.
Because of the Times - Kings Of Leon
See that little blue icon at the end of the link. Click on it. You'll get a window that explodes the link. The cool thing is I didn't have to populate that window. SmartLinks are automatically populated using semantic understanding of the original link. Here's another one:
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - I Told Brad Feld to buy this book yesterday
This works for more than music and books. Let's try a link to a blog.
Brad Feld's photo from our office yesterday
It's important to note that the standard link doesn't change with SmartLinking. That link to Brad's blog still goes to Brad's blog. All the smarts are in the little blue icon. If you don't like SmartLinks all you have to do is ignore the little blue things and nothing changes for you. But if you'd like to see some other options for the link, the little blue icon is for you.
You can embed SmartLinks in your blog or social networking profile two ways. The first and easiest way is to click on the tab in the SmartLink window that says "copy this link". SmartLinks are viral. If you find one you like, you can copy it directly into your blog.
The second way is to install a Firefox extenstion called BlueOrganizer (Denim Build) from our portfolio company AdaptiveBlue. There's more about SmartLinks and BlueOrganizer on their blog.
Two more things you should know about SmartLinks. They contain affiliate codes. If you have affiliate codes of your own, you can simply and easily replace the codes with your own right in the BlueOrganizer extension. Then all the SmartLinks you create will have your codes in them.
The second thing about SmartLinks is that this is just the first step in a much bigger vision. Imagine if SmartLinks could be even smarter? What if they knew something about you? AdaptiveBlue's mantra is to personalize the web for you using semantics and attention. There are some smart people working on this problem at AdaptiveBlue and I am really excited to see them working on making the link smarter.
This has to be big for stock research on the web
Posted by: hhoward lindzon | May 25, 2007 at 01:15 AM
A lot of people asked if SmartLinks work in the RSS feeds. This is a really great and important question. The links themselves contain all the information necessary even if they are published in a feed.
The issue is rendering them and this is really the RSS reader issue. We are going to reach out to major platforms for support. In the mean time, if you install BlueOrganizer you will be able to get the contextual menu on each SmartLink.
Alex
Posted by: Alex Iskold | May 25, 2007 at 11:04 PM
When I've seen smart linking, I had to comment because my site is Smart Linking (Canadian Smart Linking), see here:
Canadian Smart Linking and Links
Besides, I do agree with Jason that the extenstion itself only runs in Firefox, SmartLinks will also work in IE.
Posted by: Canadian Smart Linking | February 12, 2008 at 10:30 AM