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March 27, 2008

Zemanta, Get Suggestions While Writing Articles

Zemanta is not as powerful as the imaginary Google Writer envisioned last year for April Fools Day. It's a tool that helps bloggers writer better articles by suggesting related content from the web. You need to install a Firefox extension and it automatically shows related images, blog posts and Wikipedia articles next to the post editor. The nice thing is that Zemanta dynamically adjusts the suggestions as you add more content, but the suggested links aren't always helpful, as you can see in the screenshot below:


Zemanta suggests that the algorithm for finding recommended content is complicated, but it seems to rely mostly on identifying concepts and proper nouns. "We analyze your post through our proprietary natural language processing and semantic algorithms, and statistically compare its context framework to our preindexed database of other content."

The tool should do a better job at detecting the important keywords from the text and should allow users to provide feedback for the suggested links. For now, it's a pretty cool way to find blog posts related to your articles, but I wouldn't be surprised if this will evolve into a clever blog editor.

2 comments:

  1. Hy from Zemanta!

    I was really glad to read your review!

    We are trying hard to make the service as useful as possible, if you have more ideas how to do that, please share them with us.

    Maybe a word about algorithms (which seems appropriate on a blog like this one).
    Basically we try to analyze each post in multitude of ways. We do the standard stuff like entity extraction, but also more complicated sense disambiguation and also classification (via background knowledge).

    We will definitely try to improve with each iteration, trying to bring the vision of efortless semantic web to fruition (efortless for publishers and authors that is, a lot of hard work for us :).

    If you have any additional ideas or comments about how Zemanta could be more useful please mail us or use http://getsatisfaction.com/zemanta to leave us feedback so we can discuss it together with other users!

    bye
    andraz

    ReplyDelete
  2. Just wanted to say Zemanta had a new release today!

    Now it integrates comprehensive CrunchBase dataset and supports Live Writer also!

    bye
    Andraz Tori, Zemanta

    ReplyDelete

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