Tag: Zemanta

I gave the Zemanta add-on for Firefox a trial run in WordPress. Download it from Mozilla.

Here’s the background. Zemanta promises to make blogging easier for you by finding you relevant images, links or tags as you type a blog post or an email. (It works in Firefox and Gmail.)

That sounds appealing, especially for writing posts that need lots of external links or would benefit from some appropriate photos. I downloaded the add-on and opened up the WordPress admin window of Web Teacher. A Zemanta pane appears on the right of the window where you enter a blog post. It shows images, articles, tags, and links. And it has a search box.

Before I started typing this post, I searched in the Zemanta pane added to my WordPress Dashboard for Hillary Clinton and found this image. I just dragged it into this window. No pain.  However, it is from a campaign speech in 2007. Not exactly hot news.

Then I typed the paragraphs above, containing the words Zemanta, WordPress, and Gmail. As I typed, “relevant” images related to those words popped up on the Zemanta pane on my WordPress Dashboard. What I got were logos from those three sites. Based on those keywords, I also got suggested links, blog posts (mostly really old posts), and suggested tags (mostly the same keywords mentioned).

I tried searching for some keywords in Zemanta that seem relevant to the things I write about. I searched on HTML 5. The results were pathetic. Unrelated images, unrelated article links, silly tags. Then I searched on Web Standards. Same useless results, but one image of a guy in a blue beanie, which made me grin. (Ahh, that’s what web standards are—head covering.)

On the Zemanta site, there is an interactive demo. I took it for a spin using the text from my most recent article on BlogHer: Old People are So . . . . The results there were marginally better, probably because the article mentions several famous names and contains a number of blog links. Here’s how it looked in the Interactive Demo window.

I say marginally better because the images were connected to names mentioned in the text. The Articles suggested were completely unrelated. The tags suggested were a rehash of the names mentioned in the article. Had I used Zemanta when I was originally typing this post, the images would have been helpful, and as easy to grab as the photo of Hillary above. The rest of it was no help.

For some bloggers, Zemanta might be really valuable. But it’s not useful on Web Teacher. My advice— check it out to see if it returns anything helpful for the type of content you post. If it doesn’t, you can do what I intend to do: disable the add-on.

Later this week, I’ll be publishing a different article about Zemanta and the JS-Kit-Echo on BlogHer. It will appear Saturday, August 15.