Zemanta - for stuff!

It is always nice to find something I care to write about, and the easiest way to write about something is to write about writing and how you can write stuff more easily and quicker and funner!

Which is where Zemanta comes in. Or at least, that’s the premise of Zemanta. Because Zemanta promises to make you not only a more prolific, but also a quicker and better writer. Now, I’m actually not sure whether they really promise that, but writing something in good faith beats looking it up. So here you are.

So what does Zemanta do? First of all, it keeps me from writing my thesis right now and secondly, it analyzes whatever you’ve already written in a posting and then suggest images and links it thinks your writing might benefit from. In your preferences, you can actually edit the list of sources Zemanta pulls these things from, that’s why, for example, my Flickr pictures are also included.

Let’s see what Zemanta thinks would be a good picture to graphically enhance this post. Btw, Zemanta lets you decide how to style images inserted into posts, but you can also choose from their preset styling, which is what I did for this posting (upper left). Here goes.

Ah yes, so the Zemanta logo it is. Good work!

So, on to the links. I myself haven’t manually added any links to this posting yet, so I’ll have some fun with Zemanta now. All the links appearing in this posting have been suggested by Zemanta, I just added them where I think Zemanta probably thought they might fit.

Which means, a whole lot of Wikipedia links to various words which aren’t really central to the posting. Which is not really their fault, considering how broad I kept my writing (which, of course, is always on purpose – I want to attract as many people as possible!).

Zemanta can be used via a Firefox plugin or via server side plugins, for example the one I’m using right now, which would be the WordPress plugin.

All in all, an interesting concept, and I can see myself getting used to not having to search for links and images for my writing anymore.

Oh, and Zemanta adds that little thing below too, so people who really like what you’ve written can easily repost it. (HINT, HINT!)