This morning I installed the Zemanta plugin, which suggests photos, links, articles and tags while you’re composing a blog post. After you write 300 characters, the Zemanta plugin gives contextual suggestions from Flickr, and article suggestions from 300 media sources and the blogs of Zemanta users.
Here’s what it looks like:
Since this post is about trying Zemanta, the first related article is entitled “Have You Tried Zemanta?” The pictures, on the other hand, are kind of a mystery. The first is 19-year-old Japanese woman at a teahouse blogging, the image on the bottom left is a photo of a plug-in hybrid car, and the one on the bottom right is of particles colliding. I get the blogging photo, but the rest seem very odd.
In this paragraph I’m just going to talk about monkeys. Since Zemanta updates every 300 characters, I want to see how many times I need to mention monkeys and gorillas before I get some simian pics. See, I really like orangutans, but dislike squirrel monkeys. I prefer chimpanzees to spider monkeys, lemurs, and tamarins. It’s really just a judgment call. Perhaps I need to talk about bananas too, as I’m still not getting the monkey images I want. By the way, I honestly believe that greeting cards with chimps are always a good idea. A monkey smoking a cigar? Always relevant. Even a condolence card is made better by a frowning monkey.
And there it is:
The bottom left and bottom center images are of monkeys. So the suggestions are fairly responsive.
And, as I just scrolled down, I see that there’s a related article entitled “B.C. zoo break-in leaves monkey dead, one missing.”
Okay, enough with the monkeys, back to Zemanta. I actually really like this. When I’m coming up with a post, I always like to look around to see what others have to say about the topic. This seems like a great tool for that. Rather than searching and leaving my blog editor, I can see related stuff right next to the post I’m composing. In addition, there’s the potential for a new source of traffic to my blog. If my posts are suggested to other Zemanta users (and they link to them), this could be a nice source of new traffic.
Here are some of the suggested articles related to this post:
