Image via Wikipedia
One of the browser plugins that I have come across that makes your blog posts, e-mails rich in content is Zemanta. You can get it as a bookmarklet as well as a plugin. I prefer the plugin as it will recognize the page that I am on, new post page in WordPress, Email compose page etc, and adds content to a side bar based on what I am typing. It will also detect keywords in the post so that you can insert links to those posts automatically. I have been using Zementa for a while now, but never thought about posting about it until I came across this post from Rose.
Image via CrunchBase
Keyword linking: This is probably one of the best feature of Zemanta. I post on various topics, but that does not mean those who are reading it will know about it. They might want to find out more about certain things and if I can provide those links that would probably make it easy for them. Zemanta can suggest links to different websites, in some cases the official websites of a company or to a Wikipedia article or links to article from reputed sources. What Zemanta cannot do is provide links to different articles at the same time. If you want to link to both the official website of Microsoft as well as the Wikipedia article, you will have to do one manually. I am also not able to find a way to select a keyword and get Zemanta to find links to it automatically. So you will have to rely on Zemanta recognizing the keyword and finding the link. Most often you will find links to certain keywords that is not really necessary. Too many links can lead to the reader ignoring all the links, so use your better judgment.
Images: Zemanta can get you images based on its keyword analysis. It is not always the best images and sometimes it can give you images which has not relation to what you are writing. For eg: I am not sure why Zemanta dug up some pictures from Wisconsin (There is a place called New Post in Wisconsin). But the image attribution is added automatically, which makes it easy for me (If you didn’t figure it out yet, I am pretty lazy). I just noticed I can add only one image from Zemanta. I am looking for other plugins which will find me contextual images and also add the necessary attribution automatically. Do let me know if you find one.
Update: Just drag-&-drop images to add multiple images.
Related Articles: This is another great feature I like. I do not like to leave the reader wondering what I said is right or wrong. I enjoy it when I can make them curious enough to read more on it. The best way to do that is to provide some links to similar blog posts or news articles, and Zemanta can do that pretty well. I would say my post was good when someones checks some alternate sources of information and comes back to tell me that I was wrong. Do check out the Related Articles below. There were too many that I had to stop myself from clicking on all of them.
Got some tips that I missed? Know about some better plugin? Do let me know in comments…
Related articles
- Zemanta For Blogger ?! (sedatkurtulus.blogspot.com)
- Zemanta – Trying it as well (klcollins.org)
- How to Enhance Blog Posts with Zemanta (devicemag.com)
- Tutorial: using filter function with Zemanta (zemanta.com)
- How to configure Zemanta (zemanta.com)
- Blogging With Zemanta – Content Linking and Tagging Made Easy (codemyownroad.com)
- Zemanta – Zemanta – contextual intelligence for everyone! (developer.zemanta.com)
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