Suggestive Blogging by Zemata

Source: WikipediaZemanta has launched it’s contextual content suggest tool for blogging platforms like Wordpress (which is what we use), blogger, and Typepad. (Note the Oxford comma…I’ve been reading Morse.)

It reads what you are typing and looks for relevant images from flickr and stock photograph libraries and relevant articles. It will also look at what you have typed and suggest words that could be linked to thing and suggest tags. So in this article it has automatically added the links to Wordpress, blogger, typepad, and Oxford.

The related articles below have come from Zemanta…

3 Comments

  1. Posted March 27, 2008 at 2:07 pm | Permalink

    I actually think that this is pretty rubbish for a number of reasons:

    -it’s not that smart. For example, where it’s recommended you link Wikipedia up to ‘Oxford’ in your post, it would make much more sense to link to ‘Oxford comma’ - something that most people would want to look up

    - do we really want to fill blog posts with meaningless bland stock photography? Presumably the idea is to make it more interesting, but I think having pointless pictures actually tends to detract from what you’re saying. If you include a picture, it’s because that’s what you’re blogging about. You don’t put a picture of punts in just because you’ve happened to mention Oxford.

    - if it’s not used with care (see ‘lazy’, below…), everyone’s blog posts will end up looking the same and linking to the same things. I know that that’s what the ‘blogosphere’ is all about to some extent, but still, urm….bleh.

    -it’s just lazy. Spending some time reading other blogs and pages and picking out things to link to should be part of the job of writing a post, I think.

    -I haven’t bothered to style fieldsets in posts and it looks rubbish. Plus lobbing a fieldset in the post breaks our strict template. But you knew that bit already…

    /MildManneredRant

  2. John Wards
    Posted March 27, 2008 at 3:31 pm | Permalink

    I think used wisely it is useful. Its only in Alpha release, which I should have mentioned.

    I will email them about the fieldset issue.

    I just randomly clicked a picture, and I chose too put in that picture. I think that if a picture is returned that is relevant and adds to your post then you put it in. For example if I was talking about word press and the word press admin area and it returned a screen shot from flickr etc saves me the bother.

    Used quickly like I did before I left the office its not the best because I just pressed all the buttons to see what it did. You can pick and choose what you put in.

    I tried editing one of my iplayer/iphone posts which came back with quite relevant stories which would have been good for people to read if they wished to follow up. Also the links it suggested we’re also useful.

  3. James Turnbull
    Posted March 27, 2008 at 5:48 pm | Permalink

    I agree with Dan that it’s just not very smart and, in this case, all of the added links *detract* from the post.

    I did actully wonder about the Oxford comma, but found no help in the Wikipedia article. Before I’d read what the post was about I wondered “why the hell did he link to that?”.

    Of course for this post you went all out, and used very sparingly I agree it could save one or two seconds when finding a relevant image.

    But I don’t see any use in the related articles, they’re just too spammy-looking.

    Aside, I’m glad you’ve kept up the woblog tradition of incorrectly using “it’s” in every post.

One Trackback

  1. [...] natalieb wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptSource: WikipediaZemanta has launched it’s contextual content suggest tool for blogging platforms like Wordpress (which is what we use), blogger, and Typepad. (Note the Oxford comma…I’ve been reading Morse.) It reads what you are typing … [...]

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*