Online Observations

Zemanta is coming of age

Actually, Zemanta is pretty mature now, IMO. I have covered Zemanta before here and here. When I gave it a try, I stopped using them because they were not relevant, and they didn’t have a Windows Live Writer plugin. They are better at both these things now. I am writing this post from Windows LiveWriter and I have the plugin for Zemanta installed on it that allows me to enrich my blog post using their suggestions. For instance, I definitely wanted to insert a logo of Zemanta at the beginning of their post, and it has rightly presented me with a number images, out of which one of the options is the Zemanta logo which you see displayed right there in the beginning of the post.

There are several nifty things that Zemanta allows you to do. If you create a login on their service, it allows you to save preferences in it. One of the preferences is that you can specify “My Sources” which causes Zemanta to make suggestions from only your sources – these can be your blogs, your flickr accounts, and more. This is fairly useful, IMO.

One more thing that is nice is that if you are a Zemanta user, then content that you create finds its way into the Zemanda related posts recommendation engine, which means that it will be suggested to other bloggers who use the tool, causing them to link to you which is great for generating traffic, which is nice. There are other nice things such as you can get statistics on their website about how much your content has been linked by others and more (I will write more on this when I get a chance to use this feature).

Here are some related posts that Zemanta has suggested to me:

Zemanta Gets an Update

Blog better and quicker with Zemanta

Off Topic: Zemanta – a Tool for Bloggers

All is not pretty though when you use Zemanta. For instance, the images that it inserts into the blog post are hot-linked to the source. So the image is actually being pulled from the server where it is originally hosted – even if it has the right licensing for it to be used in a post, a lot of people don’t like any hot-linking. Not sure what Zemanta can do to avoid this, but as a blogger you may want to get some manual work going.

Another issue is in the Windows LiveWriter plugin – in here, if I use the Zemanta bar to insert a link or something, I can’t Undo is. By that I mean, Ctrl+Z doesn’t undo the insertion. I have to manually remove it. Very annoying.

Still, I think its a great tool and a great service for bloggers.