A new tool that’s got some ears pricked is Zentact, a contact-amplifying service co-founded by Eric Marcoullier, known for being a key player in the team that developed MyBlogLog and then sold it to Yahoo in 2007.

The service lets you tag your contacts with their specific interests; then, when you happen upon a web page that might interest them based on those tags, you’re faced with an unobtrusive opportunity to email them the link.

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb calls it a must-have networking tool:

“In an online world of fleeting social connections, we really like what Zentact is doing. No more missed opportunities to think of someone, reach out and keep that contact alive. We expect this to become one of those apps we don’t want to use the web without.”

Eric Eldon at VentureBeat is equally impressed:

“You can see how recently you’ve sent information to related contacts, based on the color of the dot next to each person’s name. A green dot means you’ve recently been in touch, a yellow dot means you’ve been in touch within the last couple of weeks, a red dot means it’s been awhile.”

“Long-term, I can see Zentact being exceptionally useful to professional networkers, especially people in sales, marketing and business development. The company is working on integration with Salesforce and other customer relationship management systems, to make the pairing of existing networks and its recommendations more useful. It’s the sort of service that I can see people paying money for.”

Adam Ostrow at Mashable thinks it might be the best social networking idea this year :

“Much like MBL, Zentact is a new and incredibly innovative way to connect people that makes you go “why didn’t I think of that?” With this project, the team is certainly onto something that could go well beyond the blogging and social media niche, though, they’ll obviously want to offer its plugin in browsers other than Firefox.”

WordPress 2.7 “reeks of pure awesome”
WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has announced the latest iteration in the open source blogging platform, codenamed Coltrane, to rapturous response. The 2.7 release is reportedly faster, supremely customizable and from here on in, supports automatic updating.

Mullenweg says:

“The real reason Coltrane is such a huge leap forward is because the community was so involved with every step of the process. Over 150 people contributed code directly to the release, our highest ever, with many tens of thousands more participating in the polls, surveys, tests, mailing lists, and other feedback mechanisms the WordPress dev team used in putting this release together.”

There’s positive reaction from Mashable, while Performancing.com says the new user interface “reeks of pure awesome“.

Rick Turoczy at ReadWriteWeb adds:

“Personally, I experienced a similar reaction when I saw Coltrane demoed in front of the WordCamp Portland crowd in September. Jaws were dropping. I swear there were “Oohs,” “Ahs,” and spontaneous applause. (Which I guess is appropriate for a release named after a jazz legend.) Everyone – from new user to WordPress developer – was downright giddy.”

You can see the shininess demoed below:

Le Web 3 roundup
VentureBeat’s Maya Baratz sums up the best and worst of Le Web 3. Highlights include Paul Carr’s take on it for The Guardian (Freezing cold, no internet, boring) and reports of mild-to-moderate snarkiness from Arrington and Swisher. Baratz says:

“But it wasn’t all that bad, apparently. Eventually, Google’s Marissa Meyer graced the conference with some advice about smart hiring (recruit people who are smart and get things done). There was also the revelation that Google’s Chrome browser was leaving beta testing behind (though is still not available for the Mac) and that Google’s SearchWiki experiment would gain an “off” button.”

Tweetag gives a cool overview of things with its tag cloud of Le Web related tweets, while Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten writing for The Next Web adds some context to the coverage from a web entrepreneur’s perspective. Useful reading for anyone panicking about what the Twitterverse/Blogerati will say about their next conference.