Leading blog software provider WordPress.com will now offer multi-media and article link recommendations based on the words a user types into their blog composition window, in real time. The company announced today a new partnership with the service Zemanta.
Zemanta is a startup that captures more internet buzz words than almost any other I can think of: semantic web, rich media, recommendations and real-time. I mean that in a good way, too. In addition to a browser plug-in and this new relationship, Zemanta is available through partnerships with blog platforms Movable Type, Blogger.com and Scribefire. The company claims it now reaches 30% of the blogs online.
Zemanta is a truly remarkable service, but I'm not sure how useful it is. For me at least, I don't find the recommendations terribly compelling. I just installed the Chrome extension, though, and will give it another try. I don't like the requirement that I have the Rich Text Editor turned on, I prefer to blog in HTML. That's an understatement - the truth is that if I had to use a Rich Text Editor regularly I would scream. Just testing it out one more time for this post I'm getting a lot of crufty HTML put in, but maybe most bloggers don't mind. It may be that web technology is not as good a subject for the service as more general interest content, or that I prefer my own methods of finding links and media assets, or that I am at core a bad person and don't want to link out to other sites. I haven't been able to find a way to have Zemanta show me my own posts first among its recommendations, but perhaps there is a way. I do like to link out to other blogs, I swear.
We first wrote about Zemanta more than two years ago and interviewed CTO and co-founder Andraz Tori as well.
Do you find Zemanta useful? It's a fabulously innovative company and it's great to see it announce a big partnership like this one. But these HTML issues are driving me nuts. Maybe it's just that I hate rich text editors, I don't know. Let us know in comments what you think of the service.
