My oh my.  I am really impressed.  I just started using Zemanta – and I can’t say I know much about it’s history, but I like where it is going.  You don’t need to use it with LiveWriter – it works with most blogging platforms, but if you use Windows, I suggest LiveWriter.  I truly hate posting content in the tiny not-so-WYSIWYG editors found in most CMS systems and blogging tools.  LiveWriter is clean and simple and, when paired with Zemanta, it becomes a pretty decent tool for curating stories.

I certainly use OpenCalais within Wordpress and have used it in some custom applications, but OpenCalais only goes so far in helping me find decent related content.  Inform and Sphere are also good alternatives, but their model seems more closed and proprietary – things may have changed, but Inform, for one, didn’t give me a chance to select the related links myself.  It just select all the related links for me, which was rarely good enough.

Zemanta sits there on the right side of LiveWriter (or your blogging tool’s edit screen), analyzes what I’m writing and goes out to find related content suggestions on the fly.  Brilliant – and it will probably just get better.  I noticed a few oddities – at least in the LiveWriter plugin.  It doesn’t always refresh the list when you start writing a new post.  Relics are left behind from the previous post, but they are only suggestions anyways and can be ignored.  The LiveWriter plugin also provides suggested in-line links for your content, usually linking off to Wikipedia for definitions.

It also offers a media gallery that, presumably, goes out to media repositories and grabs readily-licensed or public domain images that are relevant to your topic.  Given my subject-matter, I haven’t seen much in the way of relevant images – yet. 

You can also feed Zemanta with your own Flickr account and provide it with a list of your favorite feeds.  I assume this will allow me to see more related content and images from my preferred sources.  Very nice.   I’m not entirely sure what their business model is yet, but I like where they are going.

I think they need to improve a few things – and maybe this is where their business model comes in:

• tier the suggested links by: my site, my network of sites, my content partners, trusted sources and then the broader web
• allow me to roll over the suggested links to get a summary of content
• provide sentiment analysis on the content showing me indicators of whether the content is positive, negative or balanced
• allow me to help it along by selecting topic phrases out of my content; automated topic extraction is hard to do well – we believe in manual assistance, so let us assist.

Related articles by Zemanta