This is the second post I’ve written using Zemanta, a blogging tool that recommends content based on what you’re writing. I tried installing their Wordpress plugin and got glitches so I tried the browser extension and am very impressed… it recommends pictures, articles, and links in real time as you write your post. The articles and links seem reasonably intelligent, but need to get better to be truly valuable. The pictures are decent as well… I thought that the pic above was absolutely stunning, not very relevant, but stunning. Lol, I also thought it was funny how a Zemanta logo didn’t pop up. Regardless of the strength of the recommendations, its the UI of the tool that excites me and makes me want to use it again… you realize that all the hype about semantic web technologies is cool, but it’s always a great user experience that paves the way forward.
Jake knows this… the way we deal with pictures in our blog posts is the biggest tech pain in the ass I think I’ve ever faced. I’d have to find a picture, worry about the copyright stuff, then upload it into image shack to find that it is too big or too small for the post, so I’d then have to change the resolution in paint.net, and re-upload until I got it right… holy shit! right?
Well Zemanta pops up new picture recommendations every 300 characters, and the UI to insert the pics and links is crazy how easy it is - you simply click the picture and boom, it inserts it into the post with a reference to its author whether wikipedia, flickr or other image service. You can change the size relatively easy without distorting the quality, unlike when I would upload to Image Shack. Inserting contextual links is just as easy — for example, it found the word ‘zemanta’ and the phrase ‘pain in the ass’ above, found the links to the Zemanta webpage and the wikipedia article on ‘pain’ and generated buttons for each, which automatically created a text link for the word or phrase when clicked.
To give some critique, obviously the relevancy of the recommendations needs to get better. For pictures they latch too much onto a broad topic. For example, in my last post I said Atlanta one time and all the pics were related to Atl… obviously I used a great pic of the Atl skyline at night, but their needs to be more diversity. Also, the links can’t be so heavily dependent on wikipedia… other than company or city websites, almost all recommended links are to wikipedia pages. What about affiliate links?
A friend at Triggit does something similar to Zemanta, except they have bloggers input a script into their code base opposed to just installing a browser extension or blog plug-in. Their point of difference is focusing heavily on automatic contextual linking to products and affiliates to make bloggers money, opposed to Zemanta which appears to focus on content recommendations to help bloggers write more creative enjoyable posts. The Triggit tool slowed down our site too much, but we are looking forward to future versions. The browser addon concept seems to work very smoothly.
In the meantime, cheers to the guys at Zemanta for doing great work!
