Zemanta: Content and Easy Networking for Bloggers
Image via CrunchBase
In practice, Zemanta is a set of toolbars which merge themselves into your composition page (in my case Blogger's "Create Post" page) as it loads, and give you access to various sources of information semantically relevent to your post (or email - but I'm going to stop mentioning the email because I don't use it. I'm sure it's useful to someone though).
Definitely the most fun is the image search, which presents a three-by-three grid of suggested images which can be embedded in your post with one click - they're selected from a variety of sources and are either fully free, available to use under the Creative Commons license or potentially covered by Fair Use.This is a very useful resource for me - great for topping off my posts with an appropriate image where I don't have one of my own, without wading through pages of image searches and wrangling with licensing issues.
Below the image search is, to me, the heart of Zemanta - a scrolling list of relevent links. What I particularly like is that the links can be from major newspapers, top-dollars sites or relatively obscure blogs, as long as they're relevent. Clicking on one adds it to a "Related Articles by Zemanta" box at the bottom of your post.This is a really useful tool, and I always try to include at least one of Zemanta's suggested links in my posts - and there generally is at least one that's directly relevent and good material. I like that it promotes connectivity between blogs with a minimum of effort, enhancing my content, letting me offer my readers more quality material and share some clicks with other writers who deserve the attention.
Zemanta also suggests links to embed in posts - often just a Wikipedia page, but also homepages of companies you've mentioned and other useful resources for when you want to make a quick reference without having to explain a whole chunk of background - and suggests tags too.
The plugin keeps updating and expanding all these resources as you type and it refines its categorisation of your post. On the whole it's pretty smart - I usually find a good header image, a relevent link or two, and at least a couple of my tags generally come from Zemanta.
Best of all, the Zemanta resource database is (so far) human-edited and open to all - based on the instructions on their website I wrote an email directly to their Community Manager (and what a strange, archaic thing that seemed, contacting a human being directly!) and got a very friendly and interested email back in a few days saying that my blogs had been added to their database, and wishing me all the best.
I can see that human-human relationship being very hard to maintain as Zemanta grows bigger and is besieged with spam, but for now it was a very nice welcome to the network.
And having my blogs on Zemanta has already brought me a little trickle of traffic - two of my Cloud Computing articles were linked in the footer of a recent post on a well-trafficked technology blog, and my foodblog post on Morels got linked, oddly enough, by an Iowa-based outdoorsman's blog!
Whether or not you ask to be added to the main database, you can easily add your own content feeds, Flickr, Facebook and other resources to your own Zemanta interface to easily crosslink your posts and share links.
There are still a few things missing from Zemanta which I'd find really useful - the main issue being that all my photos are in Picasa which is not yet supported, but on the whole this has become a seamless and very positive addition to my blogging tools. If you're a blogger, I'd highly recommend you give it a try - and the more people who join, the richer and more powerful the network gets. Good web technology in a nutshell.
Labels: Blog, blogging, crosslinking, Flickr, links, semantic, Web 2.0, Zemanta
posted by Mark at
21:32
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