Description: Zamanta is one of the more interesting WordPress plugins that I have run across. (Though, I want to mention up front that it works for various other platforms, and can also work as a browser plugin..) Zamanta is a blogging tool that provides a few wonderful features when creating new posts. To start, let me tell you what I am seeing right now:
In my right-hand pane, I see a Content Recommendations box. Inside, I have a media gallery (where Zemanta recommends images that may be appropriate for the article being written). The image gallery is neat, and it helps you avoid copyright issues by telling you what the copyright for the images are when you hover over them.
Below that, I have “Related Articles” which pulls articles on websites all over the Internet that have similar content, so I can link to other pages on the web if I would like. Here are a few example articles, based on what I have written so far:
Related articles
- Zemanta @ BlogWorld NY 2011: (Re)Introducing Zemanta (zemanta.com)
- Using Zemanta with Blogger (peterbijkerk.blogspot.com)
- Zemanta For Blogger ?! (sedatkurtulus.blogspot.com)
In my Content Recommendations box, I can choose to only view my own sources — which it then only shows images that I have uploaded on my website and related articles that only exist on my own websites (I can specify which websites I want it to include, even outside my domain).
Below my posting box, I have “In-Text Links”, where Zemanta automatically finds keywords that I am using and searches content all over the Internet that may be similar. I can choose keywords to be automatically hyperlinked to these sources. This is very neat for defining words. Wikipedia seems to be one of the most preferred sources available for most of my keywords thus-far.
Farther down on the right-hand pane, below my Publishing options, Zemanta automatically lists tags that may be appropriate for my post. I didn’t think that they all fit very well, but I choose the majority of the tags that Zemanta suggested, including: Zemanta, WordPress, Blog, Blogger, Tools, Publishers.
In the end, I’ll be adding plugin, writing, article, suggestions.. but I’d say Zemanta’s suggestions were really quite logical.
The disadvantages:
Notably, with a plugin of this nature, there is a lot of stuff going on in my browser. The loading of my new post pages takes considerably longer, and refreshing the Zemanta media takes a while. It isn’t horrible, but it is not as fluent as I expect.
The image gallery pulls a lot of copyrighted stuff, and does not have an option to only pull images that are free for commercial and personal use. I fall under the commercial use, since I fall right in the “gray area” of bloggers who don’t really make money doing what they do, but I still do make some. Of course, it is easy to find out if images are copyrighted or not in Zemanta.
Zemanta in-text links and related articles can contain promoted content. This does not cause me much concern because promoted materials are very clearly marked.
The definite advantages:
Zemanta allows you to very quickly spruce up your posts and create much better content.
Zemanta reduces the amount of time it takes to find content, add hyper-links to keywords, and add tags.
A neutral point:
At the bottom of this post is the Zemanta name: 
This is okay, since it can be disabled quite easily. I only keep it because I feel like I need to promote the service, since I think it is so wonderfully great.
Overall, if you have a blog, I highly recommend checking out Zemanta. Give it a try.
