[Blogging] Zemanta

Image by chucks via FlickrI've just started experimenting with Zemanta, a service that is meant to make blogging somewhat easier. I'm somewhat old school in terms of my approach to webpage design / blogging which means a lot of hard coding in terms of HTML and a general interest in providing a fair number of relevant links.

Zemanta is not a blogging platform in itself - it's an enhancement to existing blogging tools like Blogger and Wordpress so it becomes easier to locate relevant images that can be used in the article in line with the Creative Commons licenses, links for important keywords in the blog post and other related articles that might be good as links or references in terms of defining the content.

This post is a good example of a Zemanta-enriched entry where I didn't have to leave Blogger in order to locate the appropriate links and that happy little CC-image in the upper-left corner there. Given the amount of time I normally devote to a single entry, this is definitely a welcome addition to my blogging toolkit and with luck, it will mean more entries given the shorter amount of time needed to complete a post.

The service is pretty good so far and the Firefox extension is working pretty okay. I just wish that my system didn't freeze up every time Zemanta checks for related content. It's a minor quirk of the service and you can get used to it since it does warn you when the next 300 character interval is up, which is how often it checks for more stuff.