After the last post on automated related links in posts I mentioned liking the relevancy provided by the Zemanta service and promised to check into the service in greater detail. Bonus: Andraz the Zemanta CTO stopped by in the comment section and answered a few questions which piqued my curiosity further. I like seeing company executives and reps out responding to blog posts, being transparent about their service. Andraz promised more features were on the way as backed up by the active Zemanta GetSatisfaction page. I’m guessing he’ll dig the info in this post for his team which is loaded with wish list items to make Zemanta a killer application.

Important note: the spam category placement is not intended to imply that I think Zemanta in any way spams anybody, rather I’ve noticed their service is being used by some spam blogs and splogs. There are lots of legitimate tools that are being abused/used by spammers, this is not meant to be nor should it be construed as condemnation of the Zemanta service.

I downloaded the Zemanta Windows Live Writer plugin and have been experimenting with using on a few posts at our group blog, VTOReality.com (e.g Anarchy Online 30 day free offer expires December 31, 2008). There are Zemanta plugins available for self-hosted WordPress, wordpress.com, Blogger and more, but I won’t be covering those here.

What Zemanta does

Think of Zemanta as an almost real time blogging research assistant. On GetSatisfaction they self-describe as:

Contextually relevant suggestions of links, pictures, related content and tags will make your blogging fun again.

Imagine having somebody — or something — that sits beside you while you write posts and presents you with ongoing number of choices for adding external content to your blog posts like: pictures from Flickr, Wikipedia entries, homepage links, links to related stories around the web, company info, map locations and more. 

Above you’ll see a picture of what it’s like working in Windows Live Writer with the Zemanta pane in Windows Live Writer active in the middle. Along the right is a full-size screenshot of only the Zemanta pane. 

Wish list #1: Allow width resizing of Zemanta pane in Windows Live Writer.

The Zemanta pane is either open or closed by clicking on the two right arrows (<< and >> respectively). When writing I tend to want as much space as possible, but found that I liked the idea of having this pane open a little bit. This brings me to my next wishlist item.

Wish list #2: let users customize what sources and types show in the Zemanta pane

For example, maybe I only want to see pictures from Flickr. And maybe only pictures licensed for commercial use. There is a Zemanta filter option but it’s not clear how to use that to only retrieve commercial licensed ok pictures. If that is possible, then please somebody tell me how? Most of the plugins I’ve seen for showing related pictures don’t include this very important option. This blog has advertisements, turns a profit, and thus is considered commercial use by many TOS so a tool that shows me non-commercial licensed images is useless here.

Also maybe I don’t ever want to see links by Wikipedia or links to posts made by resources I already use or feel are too common. Then there are certain times I want to see only related content from sources in my OPML list. 

Wish list #3: increase number of sources from 160 to 500+ and include feature to allow to only draw from these sources

Lightbulb flashes went off in my head when I learned you could add your own list of sources, but was quickly disappointed to learn only a maximum of 160 sources are currently allowed. This comes up short for the number of individual sources used at VTOR and the number of current sources which I pull for this blog is over 600 RSS feeds alone, not counting my network of Twitter and Friendfeed contacts. We haven’t even gotten into StumbleUpon, digg or the many other places one can find stuff that encourages them to write a blog post.

I’m not expecting Zemanta to cater to users like Scoble who pulls from tens of thousands sources, but there lies a middle road between that extreme and 160. That’s where I’m at anyway and hazard a guess that plenty of other blog writers fit this demographic. Please let me know otherwise in the comments if you have less than 160 sources including Twitter, Friendfeed. I doubt many do that are blogging regularly these days.

As I’m writing this it occurred to me one could create a plugin mashup using the Y! context checker and provide those results from their own sources checked say once every few minutes or so. This would give the ability to draw from a specific source list much greater than 160. A toggle could be used for pictures or external articles giving very similar functionality to Zemanta. I wonder if some enterprising developer has already done the lifting here?

Wish list #4: Fix Windows Live Writer (WLW) plugin stability issues and allow easy disabling/removing of WLW plugin

If this wishlist were in order of importance, this would be #1. During the writing of this post with the Zemanta plugin activated, WLW crashed multiple times. Before activating the Zemanta plugin, I rarely encountered WLW crashes like this so I’m led to believe Zemanta was the culprit. Indeed, I exited the Zemanta plugin and finished the rest of this post and it never crashed again. Here are the errors received:

Obviously the worst kind of blog helper imaginable would be one that came and shut you down in the middle of writing something.

Fortunately during each crash I could save before the application needed to be restarted and my work-in-progress was safe. This is where Zemanta as my blog assistant got fired. I tried to disable the plugin in WLW. When restarting after the plugin being disabled it still starts up in the middle pane. Huh? This needs to be fixed ASAP. When something is marked as disabled it should not fire upon application restart. I exited again and uninstalled from add/remove programs in Windows. I saw a complaint on GetSatisfaction that another user had to use RevoUninstaller (freeware) to purge the Zemanta installation files completely. This type of once we’re installed we don’t leave on uninstall behavior is totally unacceptable and borderline adware tactic. Fix this now.

Wish list #5: scrap the Terms of Service requirement to use the Zemanta reblog image service link and allow something more (better) customized¹

I don’t see myself using Zemanta on this blog for the other wishlist items mentioned but the Zemanta TOS requiring me to use their button in every post that I use anything showing in their interface is a big reason to say thanks but no thanks. I wonder how many are using Zemanta to find related content and get angles are skipping fulfilling the TOS requirement which clearly says this is not optional.

Here’s the Terms of Service quote, Zemanta users²:

• Service Description. When deploying or utilizing Zemanta derived content on your site or within your application, you agree to display the Zemanta Icon logo.
• Service Icon/Logo Display. When deploying or utilizing Zemanta derived content, you agree not to make any changes to the shape and size of the Zemanta logo, or other Zemanta created content
• Service User Interface Display. When a reader clicks on the Zemanta icon logo you agree to hyperlink that logo directly to our home page at http://www.zemanta.com, or other appropriate page within our site.

NOTE: even though Zemanta screenshots are shown in this post and the review is about the service absolutely no links or content was used from the interface, so you won’t see that image link here as required by the TOS. In fact during the writing of this post I uninstalled the plugin as mentioned above.

Zemanta, just get rid of the TOS requirement altogether. Credit link in a blog post like this should be more than sufficient as a site-wide mention of the service. This post will be spidered by Google and will remain as long as this site — or your service — is live. There is no reason for me to promote Zemanta in every single post where Zemanta was somewhat helpful. That would be the equivalent of mentioning a human blog assistant’s name in every post even when it’s not relevant. It starts to feel kind of spammy to me, which leads to another concern I had about Zemanta. And one that I voiced to their CTO in the comments about my familiarity with their service to date.

I’ve noticed a considerable number of sites using posts from this blog as related links on very spammy/sploggy blogs and trackbacking in from those posts. This just sullies the Zemanta brand. It also could lead to search engines punishing these unrelated, forced Zemanta links someday. The lines between paying somebody to put up a link without rel=nofollow and bartering for the link (which is what Zemanta is doing) are fuzzy, IMO.  I’m not saying that Zemanta is spamming anybody or is a haven for spammers nor that they can control whether or not spammers are using their services, but it’s an issue worth mentioning.

Andraz pointed out in the comments that these brand name companies are using Zemanta: Real Networks official blog, HP Marketing Blogs, Chris Brogan, some start-up CEOs, Geekdad blog at Wired.com, etc.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I want to deprive Zemanta any credit for being a blog helper — links here and there where relevant are fine, just not in every single post. Adding to that I strongly dislike where these links point to: the Zemanta reblogging web interface.

This thing is an eyesore from a design and usability standpoint.

Not sure if it’s the hard to read text (writers need their eyes!) or the fact that we’re being sandwiched into a dual pane and then being asked to give Zemanta our blog login credentials. It’s all around fail to me from a blog owner perspective. Why should I send other bloggers off to use that? Most bloggers already have their own blog interface they are happy using. At the very least give me the ability to customize what that link does and/or provide the interface directly on this blog at least. It would be awesome if Zemanta would allow Zemanta registered users to redirect that link to their blog interface of choice: e.g launch windows live writer with that text highlighted or Firefox plugin and so on.

Zemanta still the most useful that I’ve seen in this class of tools

Despite Zemanta’s shortcomings mentioned in this Hmm Review, it is the best I’ve seen/used to date at what it does. Much better and contextually related than Sphere. If Zemanta fills the wishlist items mentioned here, I’d strongly recommend this tool to blogging friends and probably use more myself. As it stands now, the Windows Live Writer plugin needs too much work to be added to my workflow. Might be worth reviewing the other plugin options to see if they are better. As always, I invite you to agree or disagree below. Grade: C+

1. 12/04/2008 07:03 AM PST: Zemanta CTO Andraz points to FAQ page which states: “You are under no obligation to keep it and can remove it if you wish. You can change its style from Preferences while using Zemanta or even choose to hide it.” [↩]
2. 12/04/2008 07:07 AM PST: Zemanta CTO Andraz points out that the TOS needs to be and will be updated in the comments to reflect the change that the image can be removed. As of this update the TOS presented still does not reflect this change. [↩]

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