Zemanta: making blogging fun again

Blogging can be quite a time consuming activity if you want to get it just right. First, you have to find something interesting to write about, then you have to find the right words to present your point, and if that wasn't enough, you also have to find and choose suitable images, links and tags to make your post more useful for the ready and also to establish context of your post. The last part of the blogging process may seem like the easiest one, but if you've ever spent some time on linking all the names in your blog post or searching for the right image, you know that it can take away a lot of your precious time. But fear not fellow bloggers! Zemanta, a startup from Slovenia, is here to help you with a content suggestion tool for your blog posts.

The only thing you need to do, is to install their Firefox plugin (found on their website) and start writing your post on any Wordpress, Blogger, and Typepad blog (with more support coming soon, they promise). As you write, you will start seeing link ang tag suggestions, and a list of images and articles that might be relevant to your post. The good thing is that all suggested material has a Creative Commons license, so you can use it without fear of copyright infringement. You see all the hyperlinks in this post? And the related articles? I added all of that just by clicking on the suggestions provided by Zemanta's plugin as I was writing this post. I usually like to add my own custom images to my blog posts, but I really appreciate the ease of adding links to all the sites/concepts I usually mention in my blog posts with a simple click.

You can also see a demo of the Zemanta plugin in the following video:

Zemanta Blogger integration from zemanta on Vimeo.

I should mention that the technology is still in development, so it may not work perfectly all the time, but I'd suggest everyone to try it out and see if it works for you. So far, I can give it thumbs up and a big thank you for doing the time consuming job for me and for allowing me to focus on the content. I'm looking forward to see how they'll be developing their technology further and make blogging even more fun for us!

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