What is AG?

AnswerGrid is an expert system, developed by Ziemantics, LLC. Expert systems are artificial intelligence applications. They are designed to answer questions about specific topics that they are trained on.

As its name suggests, AnswerGrid is designed to answer your questions asked in natural language, but it is not like a search engine that presents the list of webpages related to your query. Instead, it gives exact answer in natural language.

What it can do

At its current stage, it is far from being finished, because it has very limited knowledge of the world and it cannot even keep conversation going and remember what you say. To begin with, we chosed the "geography" domain and trained our system on the World FactBook databased published by CIA. This database contains various types of fact-based information about each country in the world

Since we are more focused on making the whole pipeline work as a first step, it is not at its full strenght. It can only answer limited number of questions in geography domain at this point. Such as "What is the capital of France" or "Which european country has the highest unemployment rate".

The future of AG

We are at the very begining of this. By making its debut today, we finished the first milestone. As a second milestone, in upcoming months, we will be implementing new reasoning and representation techniques to improve its capabilities. Maybe more importantly, we like to improve its conversation skills.

And as we go on, we like to model more domains in addition to geography, such as medical, financial and other fact-based scientific domains to prove that our system works on any domain.

To sum up,

At its current level, AG is only a proving ground to show that our preliminary design works. We believe even it has a very limited capacity today, as we improve its design, it will be much more powerful and useful tool for you. We hope you enjoy your time with it and make use of it even with its limited capacity.

So, please visit www.answergrid.com and ask your geography question. And if you like to learn more about AG and track its development, subscribe to its blog.

Have a good holiday season,

For that kind of high level of interaction, you can use our brand new project called RunningTalks.com ( or RT in short) and let your audience leave audio comments related to your show or post.

How to use RunningTalks.com

Imagine that you are podcasting and during the show you ask your audience what they think about something that is related to the content you are speaking about. To let them leave comment on those asked subjects, you can create a new running talk at RunningTalks.com and inform your users about that talk. Then they can use our website to record and post their comments in audio. No other tool required.

Moreover, at the next show, you can even play those comments from your audience and increase the content you present in your podcast. Currently, RT does not support explicit feature for exporting audio content but you can record it via external recorder. Keep in mind that RT allows you to use content anywhere you like. In other words, there is no strict copyright rules.

Considering that creating a talk is as easy as filling up a form and recording a comment is as easy as pressing three buttons, anybody at any skill level can easily and quickly use RunningTalks.com platform to speak up and say what he or she has to say.

Future support

In upcoming update releases, we will provide more tools for publishers so that they can more easily reach out their audience and control the content.

Hope you like it and make use of RunningTalks.com

Have a good week,

Release notes in short

This new release includes couple of updates on top of the Build5 of the Version 0.99.9. Among those updates, two of them are removal of important bugs. One of them is the bug that causes crashes when trying to open help section, and the other one is responsible for those crashes when trying to download an episode that is wrongly marked as it is in the download list.

Other than those bugs, we made "Delete all but the newest" feature recursive so when you apply this on any folder, it will be effective for all subscriptions under that folder, which makes this tiny feature much handier than ever.

End of the first chapter

That release marks the end of the first chapter in the development life of Ziepod and we hope that next chapter will bring interesting and neat features to help you manage your podcasting world. We also hope you support Ziepod by mentioning it to your friends, readers and listeners so that more people make use of it in their daily routines.

To learn more about this release

Upgrade Instructions (recommended)

Download Ziepod+ version 1.0 [ Mirror ]

Read Release Notes for Ziepod+ version 1.0

Download Ziepod version 1.0 [ Mirror ]

Read Release Notes for Ziepod version 1.0

Frequently Asked Questions

Trouble-Shooting

And please don't forget to check out our brand new project at www.runningtalks.com

Have a good weekend,

RunningTalks platform enables people to share their opinions about talk subjects created by people themselves. People record and post their comments in audio on existing running talks via tools provided by the RunningTalks platform itself.

While everybody can browse running talks and listen to others' opinion, but only registered users can post their comments on existing running talks and create their own running talks to ask people's opinion about anything they can come up with.

Components of RunningTalks Platform

RunningTalks platform consists of a website www.runningtalks.com and a software application, called RTClient. In order to browse running talks, create new ones and post your comments, you can use both the website and the client since they provide same functions.

Our software application RTClient is used for accessing RunningTalks platform remotely from your desktop, so that you don't have to use any web browser. You can also use RTClient without having to sign up. It also provides some customization settings. Unfortunately, RTClient runs only on Windows machines.

Goals

We believe, RunningTalks platform has a very important role with ambitious goals to accomplish. Today social networks are the most convenient grounds for socialization and collaboration among people on the Internet and combining free speech act with the social networking concept is yet another untaken step on the Internet.

While embarking on that road, we have these goals in our minds:

Helping people share their experience

Being a platform for free speech

Providing innovative and fast user experience

Being a testbed for our future web-based applications

As we keep this platform up and running and more and more people start to make use of it, we will determine more specific goals for better and faster user experience.

Support RunningTalks Platform

We believe RunningTalks Platform will attrack many people from all countries around the world. Everybody will try to make use of the platform as much as possible by posting their comments and asking peoples' opinions. More people means more different opinions to listen to. We hope every member of this community help us spread the word so that everybody can get chance to say something about things happening around us.

To support RT, we recommend you to share your own running talks with your friends, readers and listeners and let them comment on your talks. RT is especially good platform for brainstorming, so inform as much people as possible about your talks and let them brainstorm.

Currently, RunningTalks platform is funded by donations of its community members and revenue of other projects developed at the Ziemantics Labs. We strongly recommend you to donate or purchase our products Ziepod+ or Zietag and help us afford the expenses of our servers and the bandwidth. Your donations will come back to you as new features and fast access.

About Ziemantics LLC

Ziemantics LLC was founded in the August of 2007 in Delaware by Arda Celebi, who is a computer engineer and the lead developer of all projects being developed at Ziemantics Labs.

Ziemantics LLC is developing tools to process, manage and share information. RunningTalks platform is the fifth project developed at the Ziemantics Labs and the only one that is concentrated on information sharing concept.

Other than RunningTalks platform, Ziemantics Labs also hosts Ziepod, Feedzie, Newzie and Zietag projects. You can learn more about these projects and the vision of Ziemantics LLC at www.ziemantics.com.

All in all

Please visit www.runningtalks.com and get into the platform. We hope you enjoy your time there and express yourself freely. RT is at the BETA stage so please report any anomaly you can find thru our feedback panel. And don't hesitate to add your suggestions as well. We are looking forward to hearing your thoughts about RT.

Have a nice day,

Our next "Big" project

As we mentioned before, at the Ziemantics Labs, we are developing a brand new web-based project. It is a free speech platform, enabling people to share their opinions on talk subjects which are created by people themselves. It has a really interesting and futuristic user interface, which is based on a combination of flash and AJAX techonologies.

Like to be a tester?

We are still putting the final touches and hopefully within this week we will be starting its alpha test. And we are looking for volunteers for that test. Since we designed and developed the whole project from scratch (including Apache-like server itself and a specialized software application for remote access), we like to test it with as much people as possible to see how it performs under heavy load.

If you like to become a tester, you just need to leave your email address thru [ this form ]. We will contact you when alpha test is ready for testing. Keep in mind that we will use your email address only for that purpose, since the project itself has its own test drivers email list that you can subscribe to if you like.

New project is the most interesting and unique of all

If you find Ziepod unique and appealing, we want you to consider participating in our alpha tests and get a sneak preview of our next big project before everybody else. It is based on a very simple concept but what makes it interesting and powerful is that it provides such features that you can very easily share and reach content in the platform. Hope you like it.

Besides, this new project includes a subproject which allows people to translate its visual components into languages other than English so that anybody from around the world will be able to make use of it. Since we will use that subproject to translate Ziepod in upcoming months, we hope you give us a feedback on that before starting to use it for Ziepod.

Hope you want to be a tester and help us test our new project before its public debut. In return, we will give you a "present", which involves yet another new project from the Ziemantics to be released at the end of this year--"hopefully".

Get ready for a double-header release day coming really soon!

Thanks in advance for your interest.

To allow Ziepod to access your Bloglines account, follow these given steps:

Switch to 'Subscriptions' tab

Click the arrow of the 'Add' button and get the menu

From shown menu choose 'Add from Bloglines Account' menu option

A dialog window pops up to allow you to enter your login info for your Bloglines account. Enter your username and password and press Next button.

When you press that Next button, Ziepod connects to your account and retrieves the list of your subscriptions. Check the boxes corresponding to the subscriptions you like to add to your Ziepod.

Click Finish to finish this process.

When Ziepod tries to synch your Bloglines subscriptions, it does not check them from their actual sources but via your Bloglines account. If new posts available, Ziepod automatically marks those new posts as read so that next time you login to you Bloglines account, say from your work computer, you don't have to deal with those read posts.

If you have any question about this issue, we like to answer them. Just send your question from inside Ziepod by using ALT+F keyboard shortuct. Hope you make use of this tip.

Till the next tip, keep yourself and your Ziepod in good shape,

If you don't want to deal with posts with text-only content but only see audio or video episodes published thru any podcast, you can customize this feature for that individual podcast and let Ziepod filter out unwanted posts before you see them. To do this:

Open the properties of that podcast by right clicking on that in the Subscriptions tab

Switch to the "Filter" tab in the Properties dialog window

Check the box named "Exclude all posts with text-only content"

Click OK to apply the changes and continue using Ziepod

This is how to use this feature for an individual podcast. Maybe you didn't think of this feature before but one of our users thought that and shared his suggestion with us. Then we added it at the next release and we are glad that we have such users.

Do you have any such fancy ideas? We really want to hear your experience with Ziepod. Tell us your routines with Ziepod and let us brainstorm on that to try to make it automated. Use ALT+F keyboard shortcut to send your messages via Ziepod.

Have a great week,

As in the case of previous releases, the big part of this release is again download and synch related lethal bugs. These bugs are so resilient that we have to be a very lucky man to encounter. Even after that, it's very tedious and time consuming job to pinpoint them. Hence we mostly relied on dedicated users who tested Ziepod for us. We'd like to thank everybody who helped us at testing.

Based on the latest feedbacks we got from Ziepoders who tested the prototype of this release shows that we have an improvement regarding crashes caused by deletion of downloaded episodes, cancellation of multiple episode downloads and synching activities. However, we should note that most of the people may not even have experienced these yet, some occasionally, and in very rare cases it may be bothersome.

Other than these improvements, there is one bug, or misbehaviour, that made Ziepod overwrite ID3 tags of all downloaded episodes even though there is no auto-overwrite rule in place, which eventually cause a slight delay at moving downloaded file from 'Incomplete Downloads' folder into its designated download folder. Yet another important bug is related to the length of downloaded file names. If the lenght is more than the system PATHMAX value, Ziepod failed to move downloaded file into its designated download folder.

There are couple of more interesting bugs we found but at the end we believe this is the final release before that holy 'Version One' release. And the time might be the next week. We have been testing this release for almost 3 weeks and our confidence level is at the top of the chart even though we know that there are tiny percentage of users out there that are still having frequent crashes. However we have to assume that it has to do with the local environment. To resolve those cases, we need feedback from those users, which is very slow moving process.

As we previously said, we are very excited about that 'Version One' as it will end one chapter in the development life of Ziepod and we will start a new one.

Hope you like this little release and get a smooth ride with it. Here is more info on this release:

Upgrade Instructions (recommended)

Download Ziepod+ version 0.99.9 Build 5 [ Mirror ]

Read Release Notes for Ziepod+ version 0.99.9 Build 5

Download Ziepod version 0.99.9 Build 5 [ Mirror ]

Read Release Notes for Ziepod version 0.99.9 Build5

Frequently Asked Questions

Trouble-Shooting

If you like to install special Ziepod release with 'Crash Report' feature, here are the setup files to download:

Download Ziepod+ version 0.99.9 Build 5 w CrashReportFeature

Download Ziepod version 0.99.9 Build 5 w CrashReportFeature

Have a great week,

Thanks to your continous support, it is a great honour and joy to announce that Ziepod project became the part of the Ziemantics LLC along with our other projects as of now. In short, Ziemantics LLC, the company, was found in the August of 2007 in Delaware by Arda Celebi, who is a computer engineer and the lead developer of the Ziepod project, as well as Feedzie.com, Newzie, and Zietag projects developed at the Ziemantics Labs.

We believe being a part of a company means a lot. Like every company, Ziemantics has high goals to accomplish, in order to provide you the best. Ziepod will be part of that plan and will gain strength from every part of this new born company.

We like you to visit www.ziemantics.com to learn more about Ziemantics LLC and our goals. Hope you like the vision we have in mind and support our company by purchasing Ziepod+ and mentioning our company to your friends, readers and listeners.

In addition to this great announcement, we have one more in line. We are about to release a brand new project next week, which will be the fifth active project developed by Ziemantics and will be the biggest of all projects. Wanna hint? It is a web-based platform where people can share their thoughts and ideas with everybody in such a way that you may have never seen it before. It will be a free public service and everybody can make use of it, but podcasters may find it more useful to reach out their audience. Sure, it will be the first of its kind on the Internet. Hope you like it.

Up next! Build5 release of Ziepod is coming really soon.

Certainly, it is not that kind of "necessary" feature that we talked about before, but certainly it should be interesting to see that kind of statistics. Hence, we made Ziepod so that it provides you certain statistics about your daily usage. Currently, Ziepod can only remember the statistics for last 5 days. What kind of statistics are we talking about? There you go :

number of retrieved posts & episodes

number of minutes you played episodes

number of read posts

number of rated episodes

number of megabytes you downloaded

To give an example, you can see how many megabytes of data you downloaded yesterday or the day before and see your total usage for last 5 days. Or you can see how many minutes of episodes you played yesterday and compare it with today's performance. Pretty neat huh?

You can see those statistics by switching to the 'Home' tab and scroll down a little. You will see a box located at the right handside, where statistics are presented in graph, like this one above. Reading the graph and switching between them is very easy.

We hope you like this feature and assess yourself by making use of it. Do you have any suggestions regarding this feature? We'd love to hear them. Please send your messages and suggestions from inside Ziepod by using ALT+F keyboard shortcut.

By the way, we are about to make couple of big announcements and a new release of Ziepod, that is Build5, within this week. Keep your eyes on this blog for futher development.

Till then, have a great week,

OPML files are like repositories which are used to keep list of feeds for archive purposes so that you can use that file to subscribe to those feeds later at once, or share it with your friends. While they are mostly used to backing up subscriptions, websites also use them to provide a list of favorite feeds and podcasts in one file, such as an OPML file for "Top 10 Podcasts". This way you can easily subscribe to those favorite feeds via OPML file.

One of the first features of Ziepod is to allow you to export your subscriptions into an OPML file so that you can keep them archived in a separate file and use it when needed. To give an example, for backup purposes, you may like to keep your subscriptions in OPML file so that when you re-install your Windows, you can quickly subscribe to your favorite podcasts at once by using that OPML file.

In order to export your subscriptions, here is what you have to do:

Go to the Home tab

Inside "One-click away functions" box located at the left handside, find the link named "Export Subscriptions"

Clicking that link will popup a dialog box where you will enter the name of the OPML file into which you like to export your subscriptions

Press Save button of that dialog window to save that OPML file

That's it. This may not be the feature you use everyday but when time comes, it can save you.

In fact, if you use this feature for backup purposes, you may consider making use of another feature of Ziepod, which is actually much more powerful than this. What is that? It is portability. Ziepod is a portable application, which allows you to copy its installation folder to any place on your harddrive or another storage device and run it from there. In other words, by copying the folder into which you installed Ziepod, you can backup all your environment without loosing a bit of information. To learn more about portability feature, click here to read HowTo : Portability help tutorial .

Hope you like this tip and make use of it when time comes. Do you have any feature that you want us to add? Please share your suggestions and questions with us, by using ALT+F keyboard shortcut. Send your messages from inside Ziepod.

Till the next tip, take care yourself and your Ziepod,

Sweeper is one of the tools that everybody needs to have. It has couple of settings which allows you to define what type of items you want to remove from inside Ziepod. Among others, most useful of those settings is being able to define a time interval to remove old posts. For example you can delete those posts that are older than 7 days. Other than that, you can set sweeper:

To delete only read or played items

Not to touch any downloaded episode

Not to delete rated episodes

To delete episodes larger than given size

While settings enables you to to customize your clean up process, being able to use that customized sweeper inside specific podcast, or inside group of podcasts, or even inside whole Ziepod allows you to finish your clean up quickly. Now what you need is how to launch the sweeper.

In subscriptions tab, choose the subscription you like to sweep, then you will see "Sweeper" button in the toolbar. Press it to start your sweep.

If you like to sweep inside group of subscriptions, choose those subcriptions in the treeview and then make a right click. Focus on "More commands" menu option and then click "Run Post Sweeper inside" option.

If you like to make a general sweep inside your Ziepod, go to the Home tab. Inside the frame named "One-Click Away Functions" you will see a link "Sweep". Click that.

Now you have more powerful tool than a vacuum cleaner and know how to use it. Hope you make use of this feature. We believe sweeper feature is one of most used features but not a complete one. We will be working on that to make it better in upcoming releases. Do you have a suggestion about it? Just use ALT+F keyboard shortcut to send your suggestion or any question you can come up with. We will be listening to you.

Till the next tip, take care of yourself and your Ziepod,

By default, when you minimize Ziepod, it doesn't minimize into the system tray, though. You need to customize your preferences settings to enable that. To do that:

Open the preferences of your Ziepod (just use CTRL+P shortcut)

Switch to the 'Display' tab

Check the box entitled 'Enable Ziepod to minimize into the system tray'

Click OK to apply this change

Enabling this feature not only provides you extra space in your taskbar, but also offers you extra access to specific features of Ziepod even it is minimized. How is that? Just make a right click on that tiny icon in your system tray and you will get a popup menu with lots of functions to control your running Ziepod at the background. Check the sample screenshot below

As you can see, there are numerous operations you can apply from this popup menu. Since they are mainly related to download list and playlist, you can live for a long time without having to restore Ziepod by just making use of these options. For example you can initiate update check on your subscriptions and read the new posts via popup notifier.

This is yet another example showing the variety of access points you have with Ziepod. We believe there are two types of Ziepod users; one keeps Ziepod in minimized and the other in Deskbar mode when they don't use it. We do keep in deskbar mode as it makes it easy to drag-and-drop things anytime you want, however if you don't use deskbar mode, then we certainly recommend you to apply this tip to your daily use. Surely, it will speed things up for you.

Hope you like this tip and make use of it. By the way, do you have any suggestion about new options to be added to that popup menu shown above? Different experiences may require different options and we'd like to hear from you. Just use ALT+F shortcut to send your messages to us.

Till the next week, have a great week,

Ziepod in deskbar mode

Here is scenario for this tip:

1 ) When you see a link to an audio or a video file, drag and drop that link onto Ziepod window
2) Upon dropping, Ziepod will ask you what you want to do with that. You can either directly play that dropped media file via Ziepod or download it. In addition to these direct actions, you can also add to your playlist or download list, to be played or downloaded later.
3) If you choose to download or add to download list, then another dialog box pops up, asking where you like to save that file in your subscription tree hierarchy so that when you need it you can reach it from inside Ziepod. Choose a folder or subscription, or create a new folder on fly. Then hit OK.

Like bookmarking, if you like to keep links to the media files you encounter on the Internet, this is the feature you can use. Like managing your podcasts and their episodes, you can manage your archived links via Ziepod. You can download them, move them from one folder to another, or delete them. Unfortunately, you cannot rename them, which will be taking care of in the future release.

Drag-and-drop and managing external files are two interesting topics that we will be working on in the future. What do you think? Do you have any interesting suggestion related these topics? If you do have, then please share with us. Just use ALT+F keyboard shortcut to send your suggestions and questions quickly from inside Ziepod.

Hope you make use of this feature. Have a great week,

At this point, we developed a unique feature for online OPML files. Since they are online and publisher can change its content, we call them Dynamic OPML files. By using Ziepod, you can monitor those dynamic OPML files for new feeds, just like monitoring feeds for new posts. When new item is available thru monitored OPML file, Ziepod lists it like an episode and allows you to subscribe to that feed at one click.

If you know an online OPML file, here is how to monitor that via Ziepod.

Switch to the 'Subscriptions' tab.

Click the arrow of the 'Add' button to get options menu.

From popup menu, select 'Add Dynamic OPML' option.

Wizard dialog window will pop up. Enter the address of that online OPML file.

Press 'Finish' button to subscribe to that OPML file.

Hope you make use of this feature. Keep in mind that, we are developing Ziepod to provide you the best and unique podcast management platform on the Internet. Monitoring dynamic online OPML files is just an example of that. We will be teaching you more about the unique and undocumented features of Ziepod in upcoming weeks. So keep your eyes on this blog.

If you have anything to share with us, please do. If you want to send your feedback, just use ALT+F keyboard shortcut while Ziepod is on.

Have a great week,

That was quick! Do you have any quick suggestion for us? Please share your experience with us, or ask questions. That's the fastest way we can develop Ziepod based on your needs and requirements. To send your messages quickly, use ALT+F keyboard shortcut when Ziepod is on.

Have a great week,

Thanks to Ziepod, you shouldn't worry much about how much space left on your harddrive, because it automatically checks available space and if it goes below defined threshold, it warns you and stops all download activity till there is enough space available. This is especially useful feature if you are using Ziepod along with portable flash drives since they are not as spacious as trandional harddrives.

You can adjust this threshold thru your 'Preferences.' Here is how to customize it:

Open up your preferences (use CTRL+P keyboard shortcut)

Switch to the 'Advanced' tab.

Press 'Set Advanced Settings' button which opens up another dialog window

In that window, you will see box entitled 'Adjust Free Space Threshold'. Check the box to allow Ziepod to freeze downloads automatically when there is not much space left.

Set which harddrive to check and the amount of minimum free space. By default, it checks the 'C' drive.

Press 'OK' button to apply changes immediately.

That's it. Hope you like this neat feature. Do you have one? We'd like to hear your suggestions and experience with Ziepod. Please share yours with us by using Ziepod's Feedback dialog, which can be launched with ALT+F keyboard shortcut.

Have a great week,

By using one key stroke, you can easily switch to the next unread/unplayed/unseen item in the list and your long 'Space' key is the one that is specialized for that specific task. So how that works? Here we go:

Switch to the 'Subscriptions' tab

Focus on a feed in your subscriptions tree that has unread items and let all its posts are listed at the right hand side

Then click the first item in the list so that list gains the focus

Now press your 'Space' key to switch to the next unread item in the list

Read that unread item.

Then press your 'Space' key again to switch to the next unread one

This is it. If you subscribe to news feeds that publish lots of posts, then this little guy might be your favorite one.

Hope you like this neat feature. In fact, we implemented this feature after one of our dedicated users suggested. Do you have one? We'd like to hear your suggestions and experience with Ziepod. Please share yours with us by using Ziepod's Feedback dialog, which can be launched with ALT+F keyboard shortcut.

Have a great week,

So, today's tip is about tabs and two-folded. Here we go.

Start-up tab

By default, Ziepod starts up in 'Home' tab, which shows you the latest retrieved content along with some statistics in familiar web-like interface. However everybody has different needs and may want Ziepod to switch to specific tab automaticaly at the start up, such as 'Subscriptions' tab. Here is how to do that:

Open your preferences by using CTRL+P keyboard shortcut

Switch to the 'Display' tab in the dialog window

You will see a checkbox entitled, When Ziepod starts up, automatically switch to ..., check that box and then choose the tab that you like to start with

Click OK to apply changes and exit

Order of tabs

Click on the tab you like to change its order, but don't release the button

At the same time, press CTRL key and keep pressed till you finish with ordering.

Now move the mouse horizontally till the tab you choosed is in the place that you want.

Release the mouse button and CTRL key.

Like the ones we gave before, this tip shows the level of customization that Ziepod offers to you. We believe everybody has different needs and requirements. We mostly guess them by thinking hard but we also get lots of feedback and suggestions from our users. Do you have one? Tell us your suggestion. Just launch the embedded feedback dialog of Ziepod by using ALT+F shortcut to send your suggestion.

Good day,