AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

Mashable

Zemanta is a Slovenian-based web startup that has developed a very interesting service which, in a nutshell, makes blogging easier and more interesting for you. As of today, it’s available as a server-side plugin for Movable Type and Wordpress, as well as a plugin for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. If you choose the browser plugin variety, it also supports Blogger, Typepad and LiveJournal.

What exactly does it do? While you’re working on a blog post, it uses advanced semantic technology to provide you with links, tags, photos and documents you might want to include in your blog. I spoke with Zemanta cofounder Andraz Tori at the Web.Start conference in Zagreb and he told me that his team started out with a service that automagically generated web pages out of subtitles found on TV programming. After selling the technology, they decided to apply a similar principle on blogging, this time focusing on the English language and obviously broadening their scope.

In practice, Zemanta is a nifty tool to have. While I was writing this article, it sat unobtrusively on the right side of my Wordpress interface and offered images and related articles, most of which were quite related to the subject matter. I usually take my own screenshots, but as an example I’ll embed an image that Zemanta offered below.

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