I recently stumbled upon a neat little gadget for blogging called Zemanta. This product of a Slovenian start-up company can either be used as an extension to either Firefox or Internet Explorer, or can be installed server-side, if you host your own blog. What it does is analyze the text you write while you blog, and after a little while (the first 300 characters), it will start providing you with links, tags, proposed images, in short: additional content you might want to incorporate into the post you’re writing at present (as I am doing now).

The tool is driven by a database on the server end, which somehow tries to reason about the semantic connections in the  document you’re currently writing. This seems to work to some extent – at least the links and images it suggests are somewhat topical. On the other hand, the “latest articles” tab seems somewhat biased by what the net is already hotly discussing. That may be what you want – but often, you may want to write about something new, rather than something everybody’s talking of (currently, my article bar is full of Firefox 3 launch stories).

Does this tool convince me? Tough call. It looks like Zemanta can indeed speed up the production of an article by providing you with easy access to relevant links and images. On the other hand, I kind of like the oddball images that I usually put on top of my texts. Those, I’d never find with Zemanta.

Posted by Michael on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 7:56 pm.