marketing book survey I was also testing out a new Firefox plugin that is currently in beta, Zemanta
What Does Zemanta Do Exactly?
It adds editing functions to various popular online blogging interfaces, Wordpress (both .org and .com), Blogger and Typepad. These are the type of functions you could probably add a plugin for if you are using Wordpress on your own hosting, but wouldn't be available for Blogger, Typepad and Wordpress.com users.
That makes it something worth taking a careful look at for niche marketers, even if you use WordPress for most of
Whilst writing the last post about a marketing book survey I was also testing out a new Firefox plugin that is currently in beta, Zemanta
What Does Zemanta Do Exactly?
It adds editing functions to various popular online blogging interfaces, WordPress (both .org and .com), Blogger and Typepad. These are the type of functions you could probably add a plugin for if you are using WordPress on your own hosting, but wouldn’t be available for Blogger, Typepad and WordPress.com users.
That makes it something worth taking a careful look at for niche marketers, even if you use WordPress for most of your blogs, as it might save you lots of additional installation, possible incompatibility problems in the future with WordPress upgrades, upgrades to plugins etc.
Zemanta provides tag suggestions based on keywords used in an article. It also seems to pick up related keywords, so for Zemanta whilst I am typing this it also picked up “Seedcamp” as a tag, which is where the developers attended to get seed funding.
I should note that whilst writing this article it didn’t pick up blogger as a tag, just as a link so far – actually that has just changed. Zemanta updates all the options available every 300 characters automatically, though you can force a manual refresh.
Yes the same functionality is available from multiple WordPress plugins, but this doesn’t require plugins and works on multiple platforms.
Gallery Pictures
Every 300 characters you write a small gallery of pictures updates in the right hand menu, based again on some kind or keyword or fully contextual algorithm.
Whilst writing the article on the book survey the following pictures were chosen. (note: I have just added them to the page with the code they use, which includes a mass of block spans and floats – nasty stuff)
The pictures seem to originate from various free stock photo sources plus Wikipedia commons. I must admit the pictures come wrapped in some fairly ugly code that is probably going to look wonderful to thousands of RSS readers.
Other than the horrible code, there are other problems
The pictures aren’t very useful – some require additional payment for larger versions, and they are all small thumbnails even if larger pictures might be available for free
Clicking an image in the right hand side menu inserts the image at the top of the document you are editing, and even replaces an existing one. I had to copy and paste each one before selecting the next to include all 9 images above
No dimensions provided in the code for the images
The images are linked, along with attribution – that is overkill especially without using nofollow – there isn’t a link to a license
This part needs a little bit of work to make it useful, with both thumbnails and full images of a defined size, previews and much cleaner code.
Articles
This is a time saver for new topics, maybe less interesting for longer term because there isn’t enough of a selection to choose an appropriate article for topics that have a long history in the blogosphere.
I am just going to link through to what I can currently see for Zemanta
Each article you click is added using a fieldset.
It will be interesting to see how this appears in an RSS feed as well – you notice how much effort they are placing on branding Zemanta with all the attribution?
This type of linking may be of some use for readers, but doesn’t really encourage a blogger to visit the articles, and add something to the conversation – it is just links to related content, not what it should be, real commentary.
Your average blogger is going to have a real headache looking at this code to decide how to edit it, and the titles added to the links are really not very useful.
<fieldset class="zemanta-related" style="margin: 0.5em 0pt 1em; padding: 0pt;"><legend class="zemanta-title">Related articles</legend><ul class="zemanta-article-ul" style="margin: 1em 0pt 1.5em; padding: 0pt;"><li class="zemanta-article" style="margin: 0.5em 2em;"><a title="Open in new window" href="http://fourstarters.com/2008/03/28/zemanta-content-suggestion-for-bloggers/">Zemanta - Content Suggestion for Bloggers</a> [via Zemanta]</li><li class="zemanta-article" style="margin: 0.5em 2em;"><a title="Open in new window" href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/27/a-content-suggestion-engine-for-blogging-that-could-work/">A content suggestion engine for blogging? That could work...</a> [via Zemanta]</li><li class="zemanta-article" style="margin: 0.5em 2em;"><a title="Open in new window" href="http://www.blogherald.com/2008/03/27/zemanta-for-bloggers-good-idea-bad-idea-or-great-idea/">Zemanta For Bloggers? Good Idea, Bad Idea, Or Great Idea?</a> [via Zemanta]</li><li class="zemanta-article" style="margin: 0.5em 2em;"><a title="Open in new window" href="http://www.simonwaldman.net/2008/03/26/trying-out-zemanta/">Trying out Zemanta</a> [via Zemanta]</li><li class="zemanta-article" style="margin: 0.5em 2em;"><a title="Open in new window" href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/zementa_brings_a_semantic_layer_to_blogs.php">Zementa Brings a Semantic Layer to Your Blog</a> [via Zemanta]</li><li class="zemanta-article" style="margin: 0.5em 2em;"><a title="Open in new window" href="http://funkykaraoke.blogspot.com/2008/03/zemanta-content-suggestion-engine-for.html">Zemanta - A content suggestion engine for blogging</a> [via Zemanta]</li></ul></fieldset>
But for this article it was a real time saver other than one problem… duplication – at one time whilst I was writing there was a link included to an article on Read Write Web, but for some reason when I came to click the list of 6 links, that had disappeared. I tried refreshing a few times with no luck.
It has actually now refreshed correctly, but every time I now try to introduce the links somewhere in this existing article, I seem to end up losing half of what I have written. There is some strange rewriting going on – this plugin is complex, and currently a little idiosyncratic.
Update – eventually I managed to get it to show all 6 articles
Whatever you use from Zemanta, it automatically includes this badge at the bottom of the article – lots more viral branding and links – I think there is a little overkill.
It is Alpha
I am trying to not be overly harsh and just give useful feedback – this plugin is just alpha and shows a lot of promise, for people who like to use an online interface for their blogging.
I wonder if an additional plugin is planned for use in some way with Windows Live Writer or other desktop software which have plugin interfaces. I can see there being additional demand.
Overall I am impressed and feel this will be a very useful service for the future. I am not sure how they are going to make money from it, though they do have funding.
I looked at the demo and Zemanta definitely looks interesting if you’re a person who actually publishes from blogger or wordpress or an online blogging platform.
However I publish my blog posts directly from firefox (ScribeFire plugin) so this tool would unfortunately be useless for me :(.
The code is a bit intimidating but I am sure they will make that a little easier by giving us more options, like having an image appear on the left or center instead of the right.
I inserted an image and tried to move it to the left, and when that didn’t work I just deleted it, but the code left the post a bit messed up so I had to go into the source code of the post and remove the code that didn’t delete with the image. That could really scare of those not comfortable with the code.
But all in all I do like it and it does have potential.
Are you actively using this plugin? I tried it out, but it seems unnecessary for me, but I’m curious if others are finding it useful and maybe I’m just not taking full advantage of it???
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By Daily Blog Summary March 31, 2008 by Full Tilt Blogging.com on March 31, 2008 at 6:18 pm
By Testing Zemanta | Affordable Internet Marketing on April 21, 2008 at 9:47 pm
[...] some additional information: Some Fun With Zemanta by Andy Beard A content suggestion engine for blogging? That could work… by Mike Butcher at [...]
By Zemanta - Enhancing Your Blog Post | Programmer today, Problogger to be on May 2, 2008 at 4:36 pm
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6 Comments
I looked at the demo and Zemanta definitely looks interesting if you’re a person who actually publishes from blogger or wordpress or an online blogging platform.
However I publish my blog posts directly from firefox (ScribeFire plugin) so this tool would unfortunately be useless for me :(.
Dude, not cool deeplinking to the screen shot on our site. Please make your own.
Oops, sorry you didn’t deeplink. Never mind, being an ass here.
Andy, excellent review.
I like it, it seems to have great potential.
The code is a bit intimidating but I am sure they will make that a little easier by giving us more options, like having an image appear on the left or center instead of the right.
I inserted an image and tried to move it to the left, and when that didn’t work I just deleted it, but the code left the post a bit messed up so I had to go into the source code of the post and remove the code that didn’t delete with the image. That could really scare of those not comfortable with the code.
But all in all I do like it and it does have potential.
Thanks for the great info.
This post is featured in today’s FullTiltBlogging.com’s Daily Blog Summary – a 5 minute summary of the top 50 Make Money Blogging sites. Great post.
Are you actively using this plugin? I tried it out, but it seems unnecessary for me, but I’m curious if others are finding it useful and maybe I’m just not taking full advantage of it???
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[...] http://andybeard.eu/2008/03/zemanta.html [...]
[...] some additional information: Some Fun With Zemanta by Andy Beard A content suggestion engine for blogging? That could work… by Mike Butcher at [...]
[...] I’m quite impressed to this beta release of Zemanta and Andy Beard sure is too. What about you ? Have you tried Zemanta ? What did you think about it ? Please post [...]