By Senior Editor – Kris Smith (@croncast)

Disclaimer: Fanboy gushing to follow.

I grew up in the house of a gear head. I was taken to drag strips before I could walk and spent many a night at county fairground dirt tracks watching local hopefuls go round and round. Such is the way of rural America and ambition.

One of the greatest things I was able to learn as the son of a gear head was branding. The auto industry is a branding nirvana. It is full of loyalists and pit row pugilists defending the very integrity of brands like Holley carburetors against naysayers.

Holley didn’t pay me directly for that mention above, but they did pay years ago. I remember their stickers vividly from my youth. Zemanta is poised to begin delivering on its brand – and yours for that matter – the same way.

In a major new release of services today, Zemanta is unleashing the power of its network in a couple of ways. The most interesting to me is the aggregated recommendations for similar content online.

This is Zemanta’s Holley sticker. The same as I would walk the pit row en route to my father’s stock car passing trailers and trucks with all the stickers, Zemanta is about to do the same for themselves and anyone using their tools. They will now be adding all user content to their recommendation engine that is displayed on numerous websites.

This means that any publisher using their tools will now have their posts added to the Zemanta pool of content for distribution in the recommendation engine. This is a very big deal for publishers that want to find a new audience based on a niche. Say, like carburetors.

How it works is a publisher, see: blogger, writes a post about a topic and they have the Zemanta tools installed on their site. Then when they add the post to their site at the bottom is a list of recommended similar content from the Zemanta network, i.e. publishers that use their service. It’s free and accurate link distribution.

The second way that they are unleashing more power from their service it in a new, enhanced UI. Not much is changing in the offering for tools, linking, images and similar posts. However, the UI and the interaction that publisher have with it is.

The images and related content that is displayed in the administrative components now will give visual feedback as to selected related content. There is also a “My Sources” tab that has been added to admin Content Resources panel that allows better grouping of trusted content resources for the post.

In part, my zealotry is due to being a Zemanta user and finding it an invaluable tool while I write post, like this one. I can’t imagine writing without it. Hell, if there were a competitor to this product today it might have a shot to win me over right now if it integrated so fully into WordPress but there isn’t one. In the future it will be difficult to pull me away from it.

The easiest way to describe the Zemified blogging experience is by asking if you have ever gone 140 mph in a convertible Corvette on a two-lane country road? If you have you know how intense it can be as you feel the car begin to rise and the steering loosen. When you get back into your four door gas sipper it just doesn’t feel the same. I’ve gone over 140 in that Corvette (1962) and used Zemanta. My life would be lacking without either experience.

Consider this post a sticker on our rear passenger window.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Zemanta, using shared data (netsetters.nl)
• Business Blog Customization with WordPress (slideshare.net)
• 5 steps to achieve a “hot” blog (socialwebschool.com)