Zemanta is (currently) a Firefox plugin which throws your blogging into overdrive – it automatically suggests and inserts images, links, related links and tags into your blog posts in (currently) WordPress (even 2.5), Blogger and TypePad. Oh, and we love it.

Functionality

Zemanta works exactly how you’d want it – without any changes to your blog, no extra plugins, no settings – it inserts itself in the page and automatically gets suggestions.

After every 300 characters (or when you click it) Zemanta goes off and does its thing, finding images suitable for your content (from Flickr, Wikipedia etc) and related articles for you to insert. As I’ve said, this is all content based and works very well – have a peruse around the latest posts on the site to see some examples.

Once it has a set of data, you can click an image to have it automatically inserted into your post (formatting included), links to have the text in your page its discovered sent to their homepages (very snazzy) and articles to fill in a nicely formatted related articles page.

Functionality Gallery

Support

The Zemanta support staff and systems are both great. I recently queried (on their blog) WordPress 2.5 support and within hours there were comments here, on Entropy, explaining that it should work shortly. Zemanta automatically updated itself and my WordPress 2.5 began to work later that night!

See for yourself: The Post and Zemanta’s Blog.

Coming Soon

As if the functionality thats currently there wasn’t enough; Zemanta has also published a list of features that are coming soon! Correction: these are feature requests (which we hope will come soon :)

• Browsing through images and articles.
• LiveWriter plugin (this was massive)
• Zemanta logo at the bottom of posts being optional
• More links to different sites (apart from Wikipedia)
• Ability to prefer your old posts and blogs from the blogroll
• Spanish, German, Swedish, Chinese, Arabic, Hindii and other languages support
• Cleaner and nicer HTML we insert

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