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.