Daily Archives: August 21, 2008

Image by Zemanta via CrunchBase

Zemanta is a Firefox extension that works with your blogging platform to make suggestions for your blog posts. I use it with WordPress, and it works really well.

Here is what I like about Zemanta:

Zemanta integrates right into the WordPress blogging page, so all the new features are right there on the same page where I’m writing my post. That makes it very easy to use.

Link suggestions: Zemanta will search for relevant words or phrases in your post and suggest links for them. This is handy if you like to link to Wikipedia and Amazon a lot, which I do. It also finds home page links for organizations and people. However, Zemanta is limited in the sites it suggests links for — this feature shouldn’t substitute for you searching out and including relevant links in your blog post.

Tag suggestions: Zemanta suggests relevant search engine-friendly tags based on the content of your post. I usually end up using half or more of the suggestions. I generally have a few tags I add myself, though. Again, the software can’t replace the writer.

Photo suggestions: Zemanta suggests photos that may be relevant to your post. These suggestions are hit-and-miss. Sometimes I like the randomness, like when I am writing for my personal journal. Often, I don’t find a relevant photo, although with book covers and people, the suggestions work fairly well.

You should always check the license of a photo before you use it. You can get details about a photo by moving your mouse over it. Some photo suggestions are not freely licensed, and some are licensed for noncommercial use only. Respect copyright — don’t use a photo if you’re not sure whether you’re allowed to.

Article suggestions: This feature is the one I use least because I don’t usually find anything relevant in the suggestions. Probably that’s because I’m writing about topics that the rest of the blogosphere doesn’t care about. But I have noticed that the more articles I write using Zemanta, the more my titles are appearing in the article suggestions. That’s nice, because it might lead to more links to my content.

Zemanta does include a “Reblog” icon at the bottom of the post, which you may or may not like. This allows someone else to quote from your post and link to it when they are reading it. I like this feature for most of my blogs, because again, it increases the likelihood that someone will link to me. However, you can remove the icon if you want, which I have done in the posts I write for my company blogs.

Zemanta does slightly slow down the posting experience. That hasn’t bothered me too much. But if you don’t want your posts to become part of the Zemanta “network” of recommended articles, you probably shouldn’t use it.