Zemanta is getting better

In case you still haven’t jumped to the Zemanta bandwagon, this might make you reconsider: They just got an upgrade, including many cool new features.

  • My Friends & Feeds– ability to include your friends and custom feeds to your Zemanta account
  • My Flickr – we will now also find pictures in your Flickr account
  • Filter – you can filter recommendations to more fine grain the results to your content
  • Z-Blog, Sep 2008

The most interesting parts is the Feeds option which allows you to import your favorite feeds into zemanta and have it find posts available there, that are relevant to your content. By using the friends function and simply adding you twitter contacts (yet another reason why you should join the twitter atheists) you can simply select the ones you want to follow. Plus, mybloglog became more useful now πŸ˜€

With the huge amount of atheist blogs, this is certainly going to come in handly in facilitating interlinking to others in the Atheosphere (whereas before you just had to have something available). Now I can easily start writing something about ethics, and get some stuff from, say, the Atheist Ethicist to add.

The other one I like is that you can now filter you image results. This was sorely needed as you very often have an idea on what to put as a image but zemanta does not give you the option. This has finally become better than photodropper now since it is both faster, and you get previews and you get to see more sources than simply flickr. Plus, you can tell it to only grab your own stuff if you have a flickr account πŸ˜‰

Cool week for bloggers πŸ˜€

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Smart blogging made easy

Image representing Zemanta ltd. as depicted in...

I’ve just discovered a little plugin, Zemanta ((h/t sudobash)), that claims it can make my blogging easier and I was wondering how true that might be. Thus this post, which is party a test to check the capabilties.

Apparently what this plugin does it that it finds related pictures, tags, links and articles to your post content and proposes them for you to use. I am already using the Photo Dropper Wordpress plugin which can find for me Creative Commons licensed content in flickr that is related to my post, but Zemanta promises to take this a step further.

Image representing Zemanta ltd. as depicted in...
Image by Zemanta via CrunchBase

I’ve just discovered a little plugin, Zemanta ((h/t sudobash)), that claims it can make my blogging easier and I was wondering how true that might be. Thus this post, which is party a test to check the capabilties.

Apparently what this plugin does it that it finds related pictures, tags, links and articles to your post content and proposes them for you to use. I am already using the Photo Dropper WordPress plugin which can find for me Creative Commons licensed content in flickr that is related to my post, but Zemanta promises to take this a step further.

Currently it comes in the form of either a browser or a server plugin. The first form would be appropriate for someone who does not want to load up his blogs with extra scripts and generally blogs from the same place always (say, home). The second form, for which I went for, is better for someone who might blog from 2-3 different locations.

As I’m using it, it looks quite good. I especially like the automatic tag suggestions, and while there are other plugins that can do the same, it’s good that you don’t need 4 different installations. The only thing that wasn’t obvious is thatΒ  you need to save your article at least once before suggestions start coming in. However once they start, they update every 300 words to give you stuff more relevant to what you are typing in.

So I think I’ll keep it. I’ve already installed it in various of the blogs I manage and I think it will be especially useful for people who just don’t have much time to look around for images or think of tags.

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