Online Observations

Zemanta – a blogger’s aide? Maybe…

Here’s a service which can help those of us who are not the most creative of bloggers. We don’t come up with relevant images for the blog post that we are writing. Nor can we find the best links or resources on the Internet which are relevant to what we are writing and thus can add value for our readers.

The service is called Zemanta. The service integrates with popular blogging platforms and monitors what you are writing. It then fetches images, links, articles, tag suggestions, etc. from the Internet for inclusion in your posts.

What is very nice (and important) is that they honour copyright when they make these suggestions. For example their images are picked up from wiki commons, flickr and stock photo sites.

So, what are the first impressions? Well, personally luke warm. It’s a brilliant idea, but the execution leaves something to be desired. For example, for this article, these are the two of the pictures that I got.

I also got a series of article suggestions which were relevant alright. They were links to other blog posts which discussed Zemanta. Which seems reasonable. But I think the real value add would be the images if it worked much better.

Having said that, the interface is still pretty slick. After installing the Firefox plugin (which incidentally worked for Firefox 3), I got a perfectly integrated Zemanta UI in my WordPress Write Post UI. See screenshot below:

Clicking on those images inserts the image into your post with a link to the source of the image. The images and articles refresh for every character that you type, but you can force a refresh by clicking on the bar on the top (which says “Update in x characters”).

Overall, I like the service, but there should be better images. I guess that also depends on the topic that I choose to write on. Too bad I won’t be able to test that hypothesis, because I use Windows LiveWriter to do my posts, and until someone comes up with a Zemanta plugin for that, this service is useless for me.