Get Suggestions while you blog with Zemanta

This is an interesting experiment. I’m writing about the Firefox extension Zemanta while testing it at the same time. Zemanta is a tool for bloggers, it currently supports the blogging platforms Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress.com and self hosted Wordpress blogs. It adds suggestions and recommendations while you are writing an article by analyzing the content of the article.

It automatically recognized if you are currently writing an article and starts recommending images, links, articles and tags once you have written at least 300 characters. The article has to be saved once, at least on a self hosted Wordpress blog, before Zemanta becomes active.

Once it does it displays related images that can be added to the blog post, similar articles that can be read and linked to which is a nice idea to create trackbacks and increase the reach of your post, automatically add links and tags that have been found.

Zemanta does have some shortcomings currently though. Most links that are added currently point to Wikipedia. I would have expected that at least the link to Wordpress would point to the homepage of the blogging software. It adds code to your blogging posts and it takes some manual work to remove it again. I suppose this is for tracking purposes and think that this is a bad idea of doing that.

Images are also always added on the top of the post and you need to manually move them to the right location. The tracking code is placed at the bottom of the post.

It’s a cool idea with some shortcomings. I don’t think that I will continue using it for now but this could change in the future when they get rid of the tracking link and make the extension more flexible.