TechCrunch Europe runs an article about us today. Though released a bit too early, blogger Ciara Byrne, has written sharp article based on her visit to our office (she did indeed like the wallpaper, it's truly a classic!) putting us up against slovenian company Zemanta.

Honestly, we think you can put us up against many companies, of which Zemanta is one of the nicest as far as we are concerned. The thing is, we are quite different in approach. 

So if you have arrived here from the TechCrunch post, let me point out some differences:

- we are mostly about connecting you to readers, blogs and other bloggers, not about content enhancing (besides providing inspiration)
- related articles are first based on social trails of readers across your blog, your friend's blogs and others'
- semantic technology is mainly used to keep social recommendations in context 

These differences will become clear in the upcoming release in which we have a new design (justified criticism by techcrunch, which we are working on), social network integration and social analytics.

Lastly we would like to mention that Ciara finishes off her post very nicely in mentioning our own proprietary recommendation engine, which will take on the challenge of providing realtime, personal, adaptive recommendations on a large network scale. 

Yes, that is what we are about!

Mathew Ingram, The Globe and MailThis morning, I commented on a nice article on ReadWriteWeb. It is an interview with Mathew Ingram from The Globe and Mail (Toronto) and how they managed to create a thriving commenting community of 5,000 comments a day.

It is basically about building up a community that participates and contributes and makes for a better experience for both publisher and reader. And when Mathew started talking about Comments 2.0, it definitely stirred something in me. I'm no fan of any x.0 of anything (unless it's cognac ;-) ), but here at Kimengi we are working on the next web, so we are always curious about what other people think what is coming next.

According to Mathew, Comments 2.0 is about interaction between reader and publisher to dynamically improve the content. Allthough he is right, i feel he is not giving this second wave of comments enough credit. Nowadays,we say that '2.0' comprises of many things. We talk about sharing, social networks, (micro)blogging, etc. I think my main point is that this explanation of Comments 2.0 convines it to the website itself where the comments are made.

Comments need to break free and more than that, they need to become advocates or ambassadors for the site where they are posted on. And i am not talking about trackbacks, twitter, blogging (like this) or social networking.

Read the RWW Article for the full background and then my comment on the 5th position to see where Kimengi is at here:

How Mathew Ingram Manages a News Site That Gets 5,000 Comments a Day

Read carefully, there are some pointers of what to expect from f»dforward next ;-)

Last friday, we were at Somesso London. A great conference for professionals from corporations to talk about pragmatic social media.

Hermione from Techfluff.tv was there too and inspired by the breathtaking Emirates stadium background decided to interview our little startup and put it up immediately on techfluff.tv.

Watch the video here!

Go check it out and be sure to attend Somesso next time if you want to work with social media from a corporate perspective.

If you have any questions for us, feel free to drop us a line here, of tweet us @fdforward or @lucienburm. Much appreciated!

If you are or were at the Sommesso conference in Londen, there is good chance that you have noticed this flyer.

flyer @ Sommesso

What is this about?

We are looking for companies and publishers that are interested in Social Analytics. We might help you get more insight in what your audience reallly like beyond current (social) analytics and you might help us build and finetune our first tools in this area.

If Social Analytics is something that you are interested in, do find out what f»dforward is first and then contact us afterward through our form. You might also like to just follow us on twitter and get the conversation going there. Anyway:

Get in touch to stay in touch with your audience!