Zemanta - Content Suggestion for Bloggers
A while back I met Jurey Chalev of Zemanta.com at SemanticCamp here in London. Zemanta is a really cool tool for content suggestion for blog posts. The company was started as part of the Seedcamp competition of last year and is one of the few companies to make it to the end of that program.
What Zemanta does is fairly simple, which is probably why it’s such a great tool. Zemanta offers a plugin for Firefox that recognizes when people are editing a Wordpress, Blogger, or TypePad blogpost. On these platforms Zemanta then adds a few features to the interface, enabling people to easily add images, articles, links and tags to their blog post just by clicking the suggestions made by Zemanta.com.
The Zemanta Interface (click for large view)
To set an example, this blog post has been enhanced with the help of Zemanta. I wrote the article and in the end just clicked on the things I wanted to add in the interface, like the links for Wordpress and Seedcamp, the images, and the “other articles” at the bottom.
Zemanta’s business model is to eventually be able to sell the links shown in the suggestion engine to third parties, going for a kind of AdWords model where the adds might be in the blog post directly. It is a difficult question to answer if this will eventually become more of an annoyance than a service, but for now I think the signal to noise ratio of the suggestions is nothing to complain about.
For now Zemanta is only available as a Firefox plugin, but more platforms will be supported in the feature.
Anyway, totally agree, fucking awesome movie.
andraz http://www.zemanta.com
March 28th, 2008Hi from Zemanta!
Andraz, CTO here. It was great to read your review. Yes, what we do is simple for the blogger to use, but really hard for us to actually to do it.
What we aim at is keeping ourselves on the good side. Being the good guys, helping the blogger and disclosing why we suggested this or that. And not forcing anything upon the users.
Some more “painless semantics” is also coming in next iterations.
We will listen to what users would expect of the service. Don’t think of it as a frozen product, but more as a great platform from where we can build even greater things.
Hope to have you as a user for a long time to come, and if you have any additional ideas or comments about how Zemanta could be more useful please mail us or use http://getsatisfaction.com/zemanta to leave us feedback so we can discuss it with all the users!
BTW: Jure said it was great as SemanticCamp, and one of us is presenting today at MiniBar London!
Hope to meed you in person in future!
bye
andraz
alper http://www.alper.nl
April 7th, 2008Really annoying this plugin clogging up our entire comment stream.
andraz http://www.zemanta.com
April 15th, 2008Hi!
@alper: Well, this was one of the first reviews of Zemanta, so many other people posting reviews using Zemanta service linked to it. Trackbacks can be regarded as clogging or as traffic and rank builders…
Everyone can disable them in their own blog if they don’t like them
bye
andraž