Spice Up Your Blog and Email with Zemanta Firefox Add On

Zemanta is a Firefox add-on that helps save bloggers time, by suggesting copyright free images, related links, articles, and tags– directly from a sidebar (with search box) in your blog dashboard– a click adds the content to the post:

If you click the image you like, Zemanta automatically adds it to your blog post– one pain in the neck, however, is Zemanta’s image insert preference is either right or left– I prefer none. (please add that option guys). Also, if you simply click the image, Zemanta will insert it at the beginning of the post. To insert an image within the post, you have to drag and drop it. Still, it will only insert as a right or left preference.

Click a Zemanta suggested article and the title and link are added automatically. (See Related articles below)

Zemanta also lets you add a “Reblog” button for folks to grab parts of your blog post and post them to their own blogs. Try it by clicking the +REBLOG button at the end of this post. Pretty cool. This post was ReBlogged.

Zemanta has good intentions but I’m not too crazy about it as a blogging tool, except for its ability to find copyright free images and the REBLOG function. There’s the image insertion thingee. And while Zemanta makes related article suggestions, I feel they are limited (and many times unrelated)–besides I don’t like computers telling me what stories are related. Add a Google search and maybe you have my interest.

Sellsius Grade: C+ for blogging. The plus is for the ReBlog clipping function.

You can also use Zemanta to spice up your emails with images and links:

I do like Zemanta as an email enhancement tool– especially its ability to add images directly in your email– you can even grab images from your Flickr account.

Sellsius Grade: A- for email imagery. The minus is for the Zemanta promo/ad links that hitch a ride on your cool email.

Despite my reservations with the blogging functionality, others seem to think Zemanta is the best thing since linkbaiting.

Get the Zemanta Firefox extension here , take it for a spin, and decide for yourself.

Related articles:

13 must have Firefox Extensions. (thingswhichmatterto.us)

Real Estate Marketing

Looking forward to use Zemanta , anyways Learn the Secrets most Real Estate Professionals will never know about Massively Successful Real Estate Marketing in 2009..... AND Getting New Buyers / Sellers WITHOUT Spending a Dime on Advertising!

Jim Hirshfield

@joespake We do attribution 100% of the time. Always. It's important to us to give proper attribution to publishers of articles and images.

@jfsellsius Thanks for the kind words and review of Zemanta. Wanted to let you know that we're actually semantically and contextually analyzing what you're writing (as you write it) and returning related content (images, articles, tags, etc). The point being: this is very different than a search engine which delivers a fire hose of content that typically doesn't draw a distinction between what you're writing about and raw keywords (eg a "fire sale" in real estate context is different than in retail or movies).

So, we strive to bring you the most relevant content and then let you be the final arbiter of what's best for your post. This isn't purely computer generated content. As you, and 10's of thousands of others provide (anon) human feedback by virtue of your content selection, Zemanta grows smarter while leaving full editorial control in your hands.

Finally, I'd like to point out that tagging (essentially categorizing your content) is an important component to making your posts more discoverable by search engines. It doesn't make your content more readable or engaging to you readers, but it is a key way that search engines figure out what your posts are about, thereby driving more readers to your site. I think this is an important feature that your readers would want to take advantage of.

Thanks again for the kind words and keep in touch.

All the best,
Jim Hirshfield
VP at Zemanta

jfsellsius

It was a pleasure meeting you at NYTech Showcase, Jim

Best of luck and success with Zemanta. I use it all the time in my email.

sblgraphics

This is absolutely great tool. Thanks for sharing.

jfsellsius

Check the preferences for the attribution button.

joespake

Pretty cool tool. It would be nice if it would add the attribution with the pic, since the coding is already there. Or am I doing something wrong?

Sellsius real estate marketing blog

Spice Up Your Blog and Email with Zemanta Firefox Add On