Get Your Personal Research Assitant: Zemanta FireFox Plugin
April 16, 2008
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Here’s an interesting FireFox plugin that in essence is a personal research assistant. The Zemanta FireFox Plugin takes your first 300 characters and provides you with a gallery of images, a list of related articles, links, and suggested tags based upon what it thinks you are writing about.
Zemanta launched their tool just a few weeks ago {boom, this very article just reached 300 characters and the articles list displayed six links to articles about Zemanta and updated the images it initially displayed}. The company actually started in August 2007 and they have some interesting posts that allow you to follow them thru their growth including competing in SeedCamp.
Once you install the plugin into FireFox it will place a Zemanta box into your WordPress Write/Manage Post right column. {boom, there it goes again, it added a few FireFox images and another link that has something to do with FireFox}.
Zemanta also adds a Links box below the Write box and places suggested tags in the Tag section. All of their suggested images and articles are licensed as Creative Commons, or approved by stock providers, so there is no issue of copyright infringement.
I will continue testing the Zemanta plugin as I like the idea of a research assistant that provides content links which allows me to write better articles and save time. As you review the suggested links and add to your article, hopefully with your own content (based on knowledge you gain) or insert links to the suggested articles (as I have inserted below) Zemanta keeps coming back with better recommendations. Not even a human assistant can work this fast!
I think this one is going to be a big hit especially as they improve its performance and add other capabilities. One of Zemanta’s ideas is to sell the text links that it displays while you are writing, to third parties. I’m not sure I like that idea as a blogger since it kind of defeats the originality of the content.
As of now the Zemanta FireFox Plugin works with the following blogging platforms:
- WordPress {dot} com
- WordPress (self hosted)
- Blogger
- TypePad
Check it out: Zemanta.com
Loading ...
Craig, thanks for a review and trying us out. I’m sure we’ll be able to provide interesting alternative links and articles as you blog.
I’d just like to point out that while some sort of partnership deal regarding links is theoretically possible, we’re still exploring different ways of generating revenue with basic idea that it should not hurt bloggers and still be highly relevant.
The idea of text links is that someone could buy an alternative link. So instead of just wikipedia article, there could be also a link to their page. But in the end, it should be up to bloggers to decide if that link is worthy of inclusion in their post. As with the whole interface, we just suggest and don’t impose our suggestions.
If you have any idea, questions etc. feel free to drop by our forum: getsatisfaction.com/zemanta or just drop me a mail - jure@zemanta.com
Jure Cuhalev, Zemanta