What Zemanta could do inside the firewall

I want to enrich my content at work and at play

Zemanta’s tag line is “Improve the way you blog & write e-mails” and having used firstly Drupal add-ons and subsequently ‘out of the box’ Word Press functionality I would certainly endorse its usefulness. If you’ve not tried Zemanta it essentially presents useful pictures, snippets etc. relevant to the context of the article being composed. It also does some of the hard work in terms of highlighting what might be ‘fair use’, an example being pictures on Flickr under Creative Commons. In other words it does real time searching, suggesting content for inclusion in articles and a degree of filtering as to what might be appropriate to utilise.

Now step inside the firewall to Enterprise 2.0 land and consider the following:

We have an Enterprise Content Management system with tonnes of content of varying maturity and quality. We further have an Enterprise Search capability (Fast, Exalead, Google or something similar). Someone drops an RFI (Request for Information) in my lap and I head off into the ECM ’soup’ looking for the best content I can find to fulfil the request (which is generally very aggressively time boxed).

I begin searching, I have some previous bookmarks, favourites, known sources of good content. I open MS Word, I begin composing initial answers. MS Word has no connection to the ECM system, I find myself repeating searches, being frustrated with speed and relevance. Nothing I type suggests anything further, except through cognitive power (smile) and firing more searches into the content management system. I grumble, drink tea and furrow my brow (reality reflects greater stoicism).

Not ten minutes before I was typing a new blog article and this wonderful tool was doing lots of spade work on my behalf, analysing the content, performing searches, making suggestions, helping me enrich, enrich, enrich – and fast, fast, fast. I have slipped from a world of satisfaction to one of frustration.

I then think – why cant I get Zemanta to hook up to my ECMS and Enterprise Search capabilities and help me build my response content using knowledge ‘inside the firewall?’. Better still (ignoring security complexities), could I not bridge the public and private worlds and have my dynamic suggestions come from ‘both sides of the wall?’ Is there really any major difference to the operational model of Zemanta inside the firewall?

I do a sweep of news stories looking for press releases about joint offerings with Livelink, Sharepoint, Documentum. I find little, certainly nothing conclusive suggesting this is ‘already in the wild, or in the lab’. If I’m wrong someone please drop the relevant link(s) into the comments. If I’m right, them my challenge to Zemanta is what do you think you could do ‘inside the firewall’ and do you have any plans to work with the ECM or Enterprise Search folks to come up with intelligent composition tools based on ‘internal knowledge’ sources?

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