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Use WordPress? You Need Zemanta

Feb 12, 2010 | 2 Comments |
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By Senior Editor Kris Smith (@croncast)

Zemanta is a company that will help you to blog faster, and as they say, “Smarter.”

Here at Tech Startups we use it and find it indispensable. After using Zemanta with WordPress for a few weeks it becomes integrated as part of the workflow.

How does Zemanta do this?

Let’s start with a complex system of linking data together that as users we don’t have to worry about. What we should keep in mind is what the plugin does best – recommend.

The plugin polls the main text area where posts are being written every few minutes and based on this it recommends media, related articles, words to link (with links) and post tags that will enhance the post. All of these recommendations are returned from their platform to be contextually relevant.

What does this mean?

When it comes to media, Zemanta, will recommend photos and video that can accent a post or add to the value of the post. This content is CC licensed and when added to posts it will have a div around it with automatic attribution and link to the source.

Related articles operates a bit differently by adding a footer to a post with similar articles from the Zemanta platform. These are mostly other bloggers and news sources that use Zemanta. Also users have the ability to click on a related link and view it in a new window . . . a great way to get inspired or review a source for inclusion in a post.

Linking is self-explanatory – but I’ll give it a few words. Companies, hot topics or difficult topics are recommended as terms that should be linked in a post. They are placed right beneath the text input area are as easy to add as clicking them. This saves minutes worth of trying to get URL’s for terms.

Tags. Oh, yes. Since the last update the tags that Zemanta recommends are spot on. Previously I would use a few per post. Now I use all of them and a couple of my own. You can literally tag an entire post with the plugin in about 2 seconds with relevant, SEO juiced tags. They work just like the links but only tags.

I’m on the go, what about me?

Well, fire up your Mozilla Fennec browser and you’ll have the opportunity to use Zemanta to author posts. Zemanta can be installed the same way that it is done for Firefox by adding it as a browser plugin. That’s it. Now you have all the power Zemanta can offer and the ability to get photos, links and tag without having to find them or forgo them because you’re on a mobile device.

Faster, yes. Smarter, yes.

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2 Comments »

  • Mikrowelle Edelstahl said:

    I have tried a few Wordpress plugins which does the same but not as Zamanta does. Thank you for informing us because this is exactly what I needed. Mikrowelle Edelstahl

  • Zemanta on TV ? | Jan Bergmans Weblog said:

    [...] While writing a post Zemanta suggests links and images to illustrate and annotate what you’ve written.Visit [...]

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