[philiphodgen]

@Swizec, too bad your message was negated by the video pimping Zemanta at the end. Outbound links to cool stuff generated by a machine? That's exactly what you were mourning.

Love cannot be automated. Certain battery-operated appliances have been invented to attempt this (I've heard), but they can't replicate the real thing.

Links to good stuff cannot be automated. Selecting good stuff to link to requires good taste and judgment. Humans exercise good taste and judgment. This is the source of the value you miss from enthusiastically, freely given recommendations: "Hey, look here! This is really cool!"

A human did it.

A recommendation machine like Zemanta's is attempting to do the same thing that link farms, bent SEO, etc. want to do. Zemanta's come-on is a bit more appealing, perhaps. But its goal is the same. Listen to the message in the video.

The fact that love does not scale is liberating. I do not need a million followers. Or 50. All I need is to sit and talk to my friend Roger over a cup of coffee. Or help my 8th grader gently towards understanding the mis-magic of PHP. Or say "I'm sorry" to my wife when I screw up.

Or throw a great link on my website when it makes me happy.

TL;DR

Love doesn't scale. That's why it is so valuable.

Only humans love. Machines cannot.

Be human-sized. And give love.

[rsingel]

I think it's good to not confuse what we typically think of as links with recommendations, which I think both the OP and the commenter do. Zemanta's widget isn't about permalinks, it's about recommendations. The former are a human art form, the latter can be human or mechanical or some combination.

That said, the decline of the permalink bothers me deeply and I'm working to fix it.

[olliesaunders]

This Zemanta thing reminds me of the Alexa toolbar—I think that’s what it was, I’m going back as much as a decade here—that shows you links related to the page you are currently already on. Back in the day people were really excited about the Alexa toolbar for some reason.

[andraz]

Well Zemanta tries to help the author instead of reader. That might sound like a small difference, but it actually is a huge shift - author is a human filter and things that the end reader see are not computer-recommendations, but human selected ones.

[koningrobot]

What a karma-whoring red herring. But I'll bite. There's nothing fundamentally special about humans. There's also nothing fundamentally special about love. Not even if you use the word "love" to mean three different things in a single comment.

[Swizec]

As far as I understand the link love direction Zemanta is taking, it's more about helping a user to use their judgement and good taste when recommending links to their readers.

That's how I use it anyway (albeit somewhat lazily at times).