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- Image via CrunchBase
This week I started using Zemanta, a firefox plugin that boast:
Simple point & click enrichment of your blog posts (and emails). In real-time, while you type. We suggest tags, links, photos, and related articles. You save time and aspirin
At first glance, my thoughts were that this was just another way for a company to give me a small amount of help for adding a list of links for their benefit to my blog, but being the trusting soul I am, I decided to give it a try.
My first blog post with Zemanta, I wasn’t completely impressed, since I know html and always create all my post in html instead of visual mode, I thought adding an images to my post wasn’t that big of a deal, but as I started typing more to the post, even more relevant images started to show.. ok 1 point for Z!
Next adding related articles to my post is a plus, I had wanted to do this long ago with another service that had come out but they were (at that time) only offering this to larger blogs. Yes, I could do a search and find related articles but this saves a lot of time.. 2 points!
At this point I saved and posted the post, thinking the plugin was ok, but not sure I’d use it a lot, but that would soon change. As I was editing my post I noticed the Links section of Zemanta, talk about a time saver, it finds keywords within your post and gives you choices of different links to point those keywords to. All these links and related articles links can be opened in a new window so you know exactly where you’re pointing your visitors.
The last part of Zemanta that I use are the tags, I had been tagging my post but noticed the tags weren’t showing on my new theme. I realized that my theme didn’t show tags, but by adding the wordpress plugin “WP tags to Technorati” the plugin auto showed all the tags on my site without me changing code within my theme.
With the above listed content, options of adding your own images and related articles from friends rss feeds and all the upcoming options (like Zemanta in email) that they are adding, I see Zemanta as a useful tool for any blogger no matter the size of their blog.
(BTW, last i checked there is a difference between the firefox plugin and the wordpress plugin, The Firefox plugin has more options and Links, I disabled the wordpress plugin)
Related articles by Zemanta
- How My Blogging Style Changed Over the Years (lucafiligheddu.com)
- Enhance your emails and blog posts with Zemanta (read2know.com)
- Zemanta: Real-Time Semantic Discovery & Blogging Tool (andrewapeterson.com)
I’m in luv with Zemanta. Such a wonderful utility!
[...] I blog with a little help from my Zemanta (tek-works.com) [...]
Thanks for writing about Zemanta. I just wanted to say that there is not difference between Firefox and Wordpress plugin. Both use same Javascript and Backend servers to provide recommendations.
Amount of links vary based on the length of the text. The more you write, the more links you’ll get because as the text gets longer.
So which one to choose? If you’re blogging with Firefox on one computer, then it doesn’t matter. If you’re using different browsers from different computers and always want to have Zemanta available, plug in is probably the way to go.
You can of course have both installed, as they don’t interfere with each other and you need Firefox extension for webmail support anyway (if you use that).
Jure Cuhalev, Zemanta
jure@zemanta.com
[...] I blog with a little help from my Zemanta [...]
[...] I blog with a little help from my Zemanta [...]