My first word processor experience was on an Apple II - I have forgotten which program I liked best, but they were all fairly capable. This was over 25 years ago. When I look at how I use Microsoft Word today, not much has changed. Sure I will occasionally make use of some nice features like revision tracking, but there is nothing fundamentally different about the experience.
In particular there seems to be no leveraging of the enormous compute power of modern machines and the fact that we are (almost) always connected. I would like to see my “wordprocessor” infer what I am writing about and surface related content. I don’t mean a simplistic approach to smart linking individual words, but a more meaningful attempt to determine classify a document. Among related content, I would like to see things I have written in the past (from my hard drive, from my blog posts, from my email), things others have written, images, statistics, etc.
Zemanta is taking a first step in this direction. It is a smart choice that they are focusing on blogging because it is a well defined scope. But I sure hope that over the next 25 years this will get solved for writing at large.
