As is well known I am not a huge fan of collective intelligence as the sole arbiter of whether a comment is “spam or ham”, and long term I am most likely to switch back to Spam Karma, possibly using Typepad Antispam as an additional filter.

I am also going to grab the code from Igor so I can test Typepad Antispam in conjunction with his Project Honeypot though I think that too is best served as a Spam Karma filter/plugin with probably a high threshold.

Typepad Antispam was quite easy to set up

Grab A Typepad Key

If you have been blogging for a while and commenting on Typepad blogs, you most likely already have a Typekey account, you might just have forgotten the password ;)

Install Plugin And Add Key

Upload and activate the plugin, then add your key.

Auntie… Help!

The biggest immediate problem is that Akismet Auntie Spam doesn’t work with Typepad Spam. Hopefully that is something we can persuade Engtech to fix :)

The second problem is that I have already had at least one clearly automated porn spam hit me for moderation. With Spam Karma, automated spam doesn’t have a chance. It wasn’t a borderline case, it had tons of porn keywords and links in it.

I have used the dedicated plugin they provide, but apparently the guys at Techcrunch just modified 3 lines in Akismet to get it to work. That would immediately solve the Auntie Spam issue, and is something I will look into on a temporary basis.

It also suggests that a Spam Karma plugin will be a trivial task to get working.

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.

Links

Links are provided based upon various keywords that you use – unfortunately the links are almost all to Wikipedia articles, or a few popular websites.
I am wondering if it learns as it goes along, so I should probably include links to myself for niche marketing, internet marketing, online marketing, internet business, social media marketing, WordPress SEO etc.

Tagging

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)

Example pictures

Source: Shutterstock
Source: Shutterstock
Source: Fotolia
Source: Fotolia
Source: Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia

Maybe I should have forced them into a table

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.

<span class="zemanta-img" style="margin: 1em; display: block; float: right;"><a href="http://andybeard.eu/wp-content/uploads/Image:101_016_DRI_Ingolstadt.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://andybeard.eu/wp-content/uploads/202px-101_016_DRI_Ingolstadt.jpg" style="border: medium none ; display: block;"></a><span style="margin: 1em 0pt 0pt; display: block;">Source: <a href="http://andybeard.eu/wp-content/uploads/Image:101_016_DRI_Ingolstadt.jpg" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a></span></span>

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&nbsp;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&nbsp;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&nbsp;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&nbsp;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&nbsp;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&nbsp;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.

When I link to a Wordperss blog, most of the time I can just use pingback which autodiscovers the trackback URL for any blog I link to within a post and sends a trackback to the blog owner.

On some WordPress blogs they have removed the pingback code to reduce spam. Fair enough I enter a trackback URL if I want to give them a signal that I have written something that might be worth their while reading.

On Blogger there are now linkbacks powered by Google blogsearch, so you can tell who has linked to you. A Blogger user can also send a trackback using a convenient script.

If I am sending a trackback to many other blogging platforms, I normally have to grab a specific trackback URL from their posts. It is a little inconvenient, but I still do it.

Typepad & Moveable Type Users – Are You Whispering About Me?

That is what it seems like anyway…

Typepad & Moveable Type blogs can receive trackbacks, so I am sure they are meant to be able to send them as well, maybe with auto detection but I have a feeling they don’t offer that functionality.

So you probably have to send a trackback manually filling in a field in your posting form. I am not going to register with Typepad just to write a tutorial on how to do it, but I would gladly link to one.

Having just done a search, I couldn’t find a simple tutorial teaching people how to send a trackback from Typepad to different blogging platforms. It seems like a no-brainer article to have on the first page of results.

So please someone write a tutorial so I can link to it

This blog post was inspired by Amy, maybe she will write a great tutorial. She was lucky I saw her link in Technorati, but I am sure I miss half the times people link to me, either because they link to my domain rather than my content, or because they don’t send trackbacks.

Alternatively one of Mikes students should do it, or maybe lots of people. Mike has to rest even though he is back home, so I refuse to link to him if he writes it.

We are looking for a comprehensive write-up with screenshots.

First off I should note that Mike wasn’t totally alone in this effort. I believe Dawud may also have been exchanging emails and encouragement in the background, and certainly Dawud’s previous blog posts spurred Mike into action.

Mike Sansone is an expert not only on blogging, and community building, but also on Typepad.

If you use Typepad, find out How To Remove Nofollow From Typepad

Even if you don’t use Typepad, give Mike’s post a Digg, because that is the best way for Typepad bloggers to find out about this.

What a SEO Blunder though. Do you see that URL? Now read point 24 on the list “24) Use a Good URL Structure“.
I think Search Engine Land made a major mistake launching their new blog on Typepad instead of WordPress.

Another thing I find amazing for a blog on search…

Where is the search box?

Search Engine Land has some great content, such as the recent Open Letter to Wikipedia and Danny’s post on the growth of their traffic.

The problem is how to find the great content.

I have suggested in the comments on Search Engine Land that they should use WordPress and Ultimate Tag Warrior. I can’t link through to that discussion because I can’t find it now. I did try a Google site search.

Well actually I can, because I use Cocomments

Here is the link to what I mentioned about using UTW for tagging.