Blogging Help Tool: Zemanta
I’ve been trying out a Firefox plugin for WordPress for the past few weeks. Created by Zemanta, it adds a few boxes to your WordPress blog’s Write panel in Admin - one for images and blog post links, another for keywords.
As you type in your WordPress Admin from your browser (it supports Firefox only), it monitors the text, and then goes out and gathers what it thinks is relevant information. It also scans your post, and suggests keywords for tagging.
At any point, you can add images from their suggestions, links, or tagged words, whereupon it appends a ‘from Zemanta’ style image/link to your post at the bottom. You can remove it, however (it’s your choice - and if you don’t choose their selections at all, nothing is added).
I originally used it in the hope that it would do some of my research for me. Unfortunately, I tend to write in a word processor and then paste into the WordPress write box - so the information it provides me is usually AFTER I’ve finished the article, rather than before, when I could most use the extra suggestions.
However, on those times when I’ve composed an article in the Write box, it does go out and update when there is enough text written, and returns reasonable suggestions many times (like any other search tool, it can’t always pick well).
Is it worthwhile? I think for bloggers casting around for ideas, it’s a perfect brainstorming tool - start typing on a subject, and when you get a few sentences, look to the right for related information.
But, the tool is still in its early stages - it is limited in the content it can display, and you might find topics not relevant. Expect that to improve as they advance. And as I mentioned, you must work within WordPress to get the full benefits.
Good blogging involves researching topics - and a tool like this holds the potential for the research to be a bit easier. I’ll be watching them to see how well they do: in the meantime, you can give them a try at their website, Zemanta.com
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April 21st, 2008 at 8:53 am
David, thanks for giving Zemanta a try. I’m sorry that we didn’t work good enough for you.
While we don’t yet support any text editors, it still might be useful for you to run Zemanta over a post in the end to add the images, links, articles and tags. Each of the components could help a blog post in some sort of SEO way. Images make people stay on the page longer, hyperlinks makes you a bit nicer in Google’s book, articles give you trackbacks together with some visitors also and tags enriches your blog with more meta-data which is also useful at the end of the day.
While SEO is just one way of looking at it, is somehow useful to bloggers who don’t want to focus too much energy on it to be a nice side-product.
If you have any more ideas how to expand Zemanta we’d love to hear it on our forums - http://getsatisfaction.com/zemanta or just drop me a mail.
Jure Cuhalev, Zemanta
April 21st, 2008 at 5:02 pm
I didn’t mean to give the impression I had given up on it - I still use it for brainstorming and I do use it at the end to help with tags and such. If I wrote directly in WP it would be used all the time.
As far as features, I’d just like to see more relevant results, but of course even Google has trouble with that.