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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.
Comments (28) | Posted May 23, 2007 in Venture Capital and Technology
Comments
Super cool, Fred. Any chance of something that will work w/ IE?
Posted by: Jason Chervokas | May 23, 2007 6:52:11 AM
Very cool! I wonder if a Wordpress plugin would be good.
Posted by: scotty | May 23, 2007 7:43:04 AM
I give up. I just can't believe how many smokin'-hot things you introduce to your readers in any given week. This blog is like a friggin' volcano.
Posted by: Karen E | May 23, 2007 8:17:58 AM
Also, can the software be written so that the smartlinks show up in a web-based RSS reader like bloglines?
Posted by: Jason Chervokas | May 23, 2007 8:51:19 AM
Hi Fred - thanks for the great coverage.
@ Jason - though the extenstion itself only runs in Firefox, SmartLinks will also work in IE.
Posted by: Andy | May 23, 2007 8:57:22 AM
Very cool. But along the lines of Jason's question, seems like another cool feature that doesn't translate to RSS feeds. Or can it?
Posted by: Greg | May 23, 2007 9:48:10 AM
Hi Jason,
SmartLinks work in IE as well as Firefox.
Alex
Posted by: Alex Iskold | May 23, 2007 9:52:06 AM
Speaking of music, thanks for letting everyone know about The National. Because of your posts earlier I downloaded some of their music and caught their show here in London at the Astoria last night (which was fantastic.)
Thanks!
Posted by: Jed Christiansen | May 23, 2007 9:58:29 AM
I installed blue marks extension when it first came out and was VERY underwhelmed as I thought it added little to the browsing experience - Blue Organizer didn't give me anything I didn't have elsewhere.
But I do like what it does to the reading experience - I'd like it better if it was more open. An directory of "verbs" that can be applied to a given type of link by the publisher and customized with a cookie by the reader would be pretty nice.
Looks like it may be worth a second look.
Posted by: Jonathan Peterson | May 23, 2007 10:05:05 AM
alas, doesn't work with safari?
Posted by: Grand Egress | May 23, 2007 10:28:27 AM
The real question I have is how it affects load times. It's hard to tell on your site because it takes so long for all your widgets to load. It looks like it has the net effect of taking the Google toolbar and moving it to the link. Not that that's a bad thing, it's somewhat handy for non-power users.
Posted by: Ben Rodda | May 23, 2007 10:30:00 AM
I thought it was a bit slow too...I only started seeing the blue boxes when I was halfway through the article.
Still...very cool! Definitely worth a look.
I wonder if you can implement the smart links automatically after the fact. In other words add little blue boxes to keywords within all of your existing content. Or does it only work prospectively as you create new content.
Posted by: Andrew Boer | May 23, 2007 10:39:23 AM
I too would like smartlinks to carry through into the feed, especially when the blog itself is all blinged up.
This post, and a couple of others that hit my feed reader today, will make me have a second look at Blue Organizer, which I tried and then uninstalled a few months ago.
Posted by: Andrew | May 23, 2007 11:25:07 AM
oh great! Smartliks, Snap previews, the actual link. Where will it end ;)
Actually, love this for music and books.
Would be nice to see a snap like extnesion to show the meta description for the destination page/site or some Alexa/google ranking info a well
Posted by: OffBeatMammal | May 23, 2007 12:49:57 PM
Alex is genius...his writing on RWW is amazing...
SmartLinking is a way better play/distribution technique than the Firefox extension [which I've had installed since Fred originally blogged it, but have only used a couple times].
"Ooo-oooh that smell! Can't you smell that smell?"
I can...the smell of something that is going to be awesome, that is!
p.s. the above quote is a li'l inside joke, I'm not being completely weird/random ;-)
Posted by: Ethan Bauley | May 23, 2007 1:01:47 PM
It's a pity that SmartLinks require Javascript, and so don't work at many sites (e.g., WordPress.com).
Posted by: Andrew | May 23, 2007 3:43:00 PM
ethan
thanks for referring to yesterday's twitter message. i got the inside reference.
fred
Posted by: fred wilson | May 23, 2007 3:46:16 PM
Thank you very much for your informative blog. I recently discovered it and I am recommending it to all my colleagues. Keep up the great work.
Posted by: KindAndThoughtful | May 23, 2007 5:19:44 PM
Thanks for the heads up, but if this worked in RSS it would be even better. Even without RSS this is a hint of the future where the web could be really useful and understand us better. Rock on!
Posted by: adrian | May 23, 2007 7:01:32 PM
Great tool, Fred. I'm curious, though -- does it allow you to pick which retailers and other links are included? I link to a decent amount of music on my blog, and like to direct readers to smaller music retailers like Insound, LaLa.com and Newbury Comics rather than Amazon. Besides helping out the "little guy", their prices are usually cheaper too (especially LaLa and Newbury). I'd be a lot more likely to use this tool if I could direct people to these stores instead of Amazon.
Posted by: Steve | May 23, 2007 7:10:20 PM
In regards to the affiliate marketing side of things, is it possible for the tool to automatically include our affiliate IDs? I am a lot more likely to use the product if it cuts down my time in gathering the affiliate links, but not at the expense of of loosing the income.
Is this the way SmartLinks plans to monterize the service? If it's a question of cost, I'd be happy to profit share/pay a fee to use the tool.
(I realise you can manually enter in your own affiliate links, but it'd save me a lot of time if I could just enter my amazon id, my itunes id etc etc)
Posted by: William Ryall | May 23, 2007 11:15:00 PM
William,
You can plugin ids for all affiliate programs that are featured in the links. It is done once and is really simple. All profits are yours for these. We are going to put up tip on the side how to do this for any program via JavaScript. In the tool you can put in Amazon code under the account settings.
Alex
Posted by: Alex Iskold | May 23, 2007 11:41:00 PM
very sweet.
nice job alex!
Posted by: bijan | May 24, 2007 12:18:30 AM
Thanks, Alex. I was unsure after Fred's post, to me it read that you had to enter in the unique web address to claim your refferal money, which in reality wouldn't save me any time at all. This will save me plenty
Any chance of rather than the blue box appearing that it could load a separate landing page?
E.g say I want to link to a Kings of Leon album rather than the user having to click the box, they could click the link and then it would load a smartlinking loading page with the same information as contain in the JS popup. (There are other sites out there which do this, but not well)
Posted by: William Ryall | May 24, 2007 10:13:09 AM
Still thinking about this a few days later. What this could do for music distribution is something I can't stop pondering. With the semantic web artists can take more advantage of web presence.
Posted by: Patrick Woodward | May 24, 2007 4:46:12 PM
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