I just learned about this new service that “enhances” your blog’s content, called Zemanta. You type in your blog post and it does your research for you, resulting in a selection of relevant links, articles, and photos that you can then insert into your post. When I first saw this (via Weblog Tools Collection) I thought the whole idea was pretty goofy. But then I guiltily remembered all the times I haven’t bothered to add Amazon links to the books I’m writing about, let alone links to support my arguments. So I decided to try out the demo.
First, I typed in a quick review (using all the proper jargon of course). Here’s a screenshot:
Whoops, I cropped off the Go button. There is a Go button. When you hit the Go button, a list of links, articles, photos, and tags is generated, like so:
Hmmm. I detect some problems.
First, the links. You can click on “Apply all” without even knowing what you are linking to! Hopefully, the book titles will turn out to be links to Amazon (or Powell’s). Hopefully, the author’s name will turn out to be a link to either Norton’s P O’B website or perhaps The Gunroom — but which? And why is there a link to “Capt.”?
Second, the tags. Check out the tags it chose. Government? Embassies and Consulates? Captain? If you clicked “Apply all” for those tags I wouldn’t be surprised if Google penalized you for keyword stuffing.
Well, let’s see what happens when I click on Apply All:
Dang! All the links turned out to be from Wikipedia. While I find Wikipedia a great source for many things, particularly for quick answers to simple factual questions, it is the last place I would link to when writing a book review. Wikipedia articles about books tend to be more like Cliff notes than anything else, with dry plot “summaries” that are full of spoilers and terribly boring to read. The Wikipedia articles about Patrick O’Brian’s books (the few articles I’ve looked at, anyway) convey absolutely nothing of the series’ charm. Then there’s the “Capt.” link, which turns out to be a Wikipedia article titled “Captain (United States)” — completely irrelevant to my blog post. Last but not least, all those people who arrive at my Patrick O’Brian review because they were looking for information about Embassies and Consulates are going to be a bit annoyed.
In conclusion: I don’t know. Maybe my “article” was too short. Maybe if I’d blabbed on and on in great detail about my favorite author I would have gotten better links and more relevant tags. But to be on the safe side, I’d suggest that if you use this thing, use it with caution. Don’t click on “Apply all” indiscriminately. If you hover over the link list the sources will pop up: make sure you do that. Zemanta is in “alpha” so perhaps there is still time for the developers to make some changes. I would suggest removing the Apply all option and/or making it so that you have to see the source of each link before you approve it. But the concept is kinda cool.
9 Comments
Hy from Zemanta!
Thank you for your in-depth review. We haven’t actually tried to optimize the experience for book-bloggers, but you can probably see that yourself.
We are however carefully listening to all initial feedbacks and will craft next iterations of the service accordingly.
About the suggestions:
- first we expect the users to be selective about what they link to, but also offer apply all to the lazy ones. It depends on the user how much he values his time versus quality of the post. We believe most users will not use “apply all”, but some will prefer that automagic.
– the “capt” thing is definitely a bug with our backend engine and you can expect to find it fixed in next iteration. Thank you for pointing it out.
– the tags, well from what i see we got most of them right, and that’s what we are aiming for. Yes definitely there will be some noise, because computers still do not really understand everything humans say and think. But the question is, is it useful for you to have those few automatically available?
If you hover with a mouse over “The Mauritius Command” link you should get an offer to link directly to the Amazon page of the book. Also comming is more deep links to the content, but we are in alpha, and can’t have everything at the same time.
All in all I think your observations are very valid and valuable to us and will try hard to improve on those points!
If you have any questions, please contact us, also if you have any additional ideas or comments about how Zemanta could be more useful please mail us or use http://getsatisfaction.com/zemanta and leave us feedback so we can discuss it!
bye
andraž
I signed up for this yesterday – more for my other blog (about Disney World) so I could find some related images. It’s interesting that you can find amazon links as mine were all wordpress – but I like to use my associate code so I’d need to add them manually anyway.
Also I use Wordpress – and they did a new release yesterday – and after upgrading Zemanta doesn’t work! apparently they’re trying to fix it… but the beta of the latest wp release has been a round for a while so you’d think they would have done that already…
Oh and I like how the guy commenting here suggests you go to that Satisfaction place to post feedback/questions – I did that last night – and although it says there are 5 zemanta employees waiting to answer no one has yet!
Bummer that it doesn’t work with 2.5! I didn’t actually download Zemanta; I just used the demo on their site.
I haven’t gotten a response to my email yet, either. They probably have their hands full, especially with all the people who’ve upgraded their blogs in the last 24 hours. :P
Our front end magician took care of WP 2.5 support rollout, just couple of minutes ago.
We are sorry for inconveniences in the meantime
bye
andraž
I’ve started using Zemanta now its fixed for 2.5 – I apply the links sparingly and think some of them are useful. Did you give up on it?
Hi,
shortly some new Zemanta features regarding books are comming :)
Mrs. S, I never actually downloaded it. I just tried the demo version. And since I didn’t find it all that useful at the time, I didn’t pursue it. But I am curious to find out what the new features are. Andraz, I hope you’ll keep us posted!
Hello everybody. I just wanted to post a quick update on this issue. Zemanta had a new release a few days ago, and in which we also greatly improved Amazon support. Now we know how automatically detect a lot more books, and you can also set up your own Amazon affiliate code.
More information: http://www.zemanta.com/blog/new-release-more-stuff/
If you have any problems, please visit our forums – getsatisfaction.com/zemanta or just drop me a mail – jure@zemanta.com
Jure Cuhalev, Zemanta