Zemanta is a Firefox add-on specifically designed for bloggers and emailers. It finds multimedia content and tags as you type and makes suggestions in a sidebar for inclusion on your blog or email, providing a small preview if you roll over. It can also link to social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as combing your Flickr account for photos.
It tracks down the content by scanning what you are writing. Zemanta does well on photos, finding images from Creative Commons and, if you link it, your Flickr account, but on articles it isn't so clear, telling us only that the results are indexed from "over 10,000 top media sources and quality blogs of our users". When I tested the tool, the photos were great, but the articles didn't always hit the nail on the head. The search function improves your chances so it's worth trying it, but sometimes the suggestions are still a bit strange.
Once you have selected the Zemanta content you want, a click will insert it in your post. Interesting articles are linked at the bottom, while images are inserted either on the left or right of the post. You can toggle some options in preferences at the bottom of the sidebar. Unfortunately, once it is in the post, the Zemanta content is hard to format. There are some tutorials on the Zemanta website, but they weren't really that useful.
As any blogger knows, maximizing your posts is of really important. Having on-hand suggestions for content and multimedia additions is great, but Zemanta isn't as user-friendly as it might be. The app doesn't spend enough time going over the basics of the tool and, last but not least, the content isn't all it could be.
Zemanta - a Firefox add-on that isn't quite living up to its potential.
