What do you call a real-time semantic analysis tool that plugs in to your blogging software and leverages an API for a huge database of petitions, charities and volunteer opportunities to change the world, powered by an extensible markup language that lets anyone load in more calls to action? Hot as hell - that’s what we’d call it.
Zemanta, a fascinating service that offers bloggers relevant links, photos and other assets to include in their blog posts, announced a great new feature today - semantically related calls to action for social good, powered by a new API from the organization Social Actions.
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By leveraging the new Social Actions API, Zemanta reads the text you’re writing while you blog, figures out what topics you’re writing about and gives you one-click options to add related links to petitions and campaigns from nonprofit and social good organizations to the bottom of your blog post.
Social Actions currently offers more than 60,000 opportunities from over 50 different organizations, from Kiva to Volunteer Match to Wildlife Direct. The organization is rolling out an XML based markup that will allow anyone to add data to the collection with ease.
The next step is more sophisticated filtering, but for now blog authors do that manually. It’s remarkably easy to do. Zemanta’s core product is a plug-in that works particularly well with WordPress blogs but you can test the new Social Action component on this page.
Some topics are going to bring better results than others. It will be interesting to see how much overlap there is between most bloggers around the web and the database of nonprofit calls to action. After all, if most people really cared about or felt capable of making the world a better place - then the world would be a really different place. Perhaps all these smart technologies bringing social change right to our fingertips will make opportunities like this easier to act on though.
