One of the things Blog World provides plenty of is new products and software with amazing claims of greatness. There are some that I think look good enough to check out further, and some that I don’t, but there’s rarely any that I feel have hit a home run. Zemanta may be one of those. I say “may be”, because it’s a tool that assists you with finding photos and related articles to link to based on your content, as well as tags for your post, so this very post IS the review and we’ll all know how well it worked by the end of the post. Of course, the post is about blogging tools, so I’ll add in some content about why you might need a blogging tool to help you with your posts.

Find me some photos

One of the biggest problems I find while blogging is how hard it can be to find visual media to accompany my posts. If, for example, I’m writing this post about writing tools, I would probably want pictures of writing implements, note pads, maybe a keyboard or a laptop. The laptop might be my preference because that’s what I’m using to write this post. So if I type “laptop” a couple times in my post, what might I get photos of? Let’s see….

[there WAS an image of a ball park here]

OK… Maybe Euphamisms mess up the algorithm a bit, but this was just one of 9 suggested on the first page of results in my new blog post side bar. The photos included one of a laptop that I could use and a couple others that were completely not relevant. The more I type, the better my selections become. For example, when I refresh my selection, I now find another laptop that I like better.

[there WAS another image here of a keyboard]

It’s close enough. I don’t like how it throws the photo kind of randomly into my post text. Sometimes it’s where I expect it and sometimes it’s at the top of my post.

Let’s get some links!

It seems that if you add a link like the one above, it removes your images, which I consider a serious flaw in the the fireflox plugin version of the Zemanta software.

Maybe the SEO tags work?

I think it moved my link, too. I can’t tell anymore. It did give me some good tags to add, and there’s some OK images to choose from, which will save you time, but it’s more hassle than it is useful if it’s going to mangle all of its own progress.

What’s the conclusion?
I still think it’s a genius idea and will be very helpful to me if it really works. I will give it one more shot with a future post and see how it does. If it still fails, it’ll be uninstalled until some things get fixed. The upside is that I’ve installed the FireFox plugin, so if the verdict is failure, I’ll just remove the plugin. A few other blogs seem to have had better luck than me, so try it out for yourself and let me know.

NOTE: Any missing or displaced links and/or images are intentionally left that way to preserve the results of my testing and are the product of the testing.

UPDATE: Oh look at that… The link is embedded in the content. That’s actually very handy.

Related posts:

1. Zemanta Review Part Two
2. How Blog Spam Works
3. 10 Critical Blogging Tips I Learned At Phoenix WordCamp
4. How to Snoop Online – OR – No Retards Allowed
5. First Video Blog : Reviewing the Pure Digital Flip From a Vocano