Bloggers like me often read a lot to be able to provide quality blogs. Most of the time this research process takes time – about 90% of the time compared to the actual writing process itself.
When I saw Zemanta, I quickly tried it out to see how effective it is. One of the best features of this free service is finding contents for any topic. For example, if I want to blog about “Utah Jazz” I just type in “Utah Jazz” to its search box. By the way, the example below is used using Zemanta’s Windows Live Writer plugin (http://www.zemanta.com):
The search results are primarily media based presented with thumbnails so it is easy to browse and choose items. When you hover an item you can see a larger version of that item along with the description and license information of the media. This feature is very useful since you won’t have to worry about licensing information anymore.
When you click an item at the search results it appears as a content in your blog. See the example below where I clicked a couple of links to create a “related links” list:
The tool automates the HTML creation of the links and the images. It also adds a “reblog” link so that your readers could easily refer to your blog if they chose to repost the blog on their own blogs. Your readers can capture any text that has the ‘Reblog’ button appearing beneath it – making it easier for them to quote your content.
The tool offers other functionality like common tags (http://commontag.org/) which makes it easier to describe and organize the content of external resources from within your own content.
I saw some “features” in the plugin that might confuse new users. If you search for an item, the item you last searched will still appear at the end of the list of your currently searched item under the “previous updates” list. Also I doubt if the search result items are really that “recent” since most items appeared are 2 to 3 months old. How does it rank search results? That I am yet to figure out.
Overall, I am happy with Zemanta’s features. Since it integrates with Live Writer as a plugin, it is very easy to add media and links to blogs. If you don’t mind installing yet another plugin for Windows Live Writer, this tool is a worthy addition.
Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.
Hi Aseem,
Thanks for writing a post about Zemanta. To answer your question and to clarify for your readers…
Zemanta does a contextual analysis of what you’re writing – as you write it. So the results we present to you are not search results in the same sense as what you’d expect on a search engine (e.g. Google). Our “search” window is more like a “refinement” feature. That’s why the previous results are still there – we “think” each query is part of the same blog post, and in aggregate relate to your current blog post topic.
There’s nothing wrong with beginning your writing experience with a “search”. But you might also find it interesting to just start writing and let Zemanta delver results to you automatically after you’ve written a short paragraph. You might be surprised to find that you don’t need to search at all.
Thanks again and happy blogging,
Jim
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