Comments on: Zemanta launches, I'm not convinced

By: andraz

andraz — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 11:42:59 +0000

Hmmm, it might be the question about how you expect bloggers to use the service.

We would expect the bloggers that want to have quality content to use the recommendations made by Zemanta as suggestions. Then checking them out and deciding if they are on topic and important for their current post. Just trying to make their work easier.

Also many people find recommended images very handy, since they use them for illustration and decoration of their own blogs. If we do good suggestions they keep them, if we don't they go to flickr or some other site and find better ones.

Naturally there will be the ones that just click "apply all" and never check anything, but that means that they just don't care. With or without Zemanta.

We can't really improve or worsen the attitude blogger has toward his posts.

Well I hope we can discuss this further. My question would be the following: what would you like this kind of 'automatic research' tool to provide to you as a blogger?

Maybe we can find some new and interesting ideas about that?

bye
andraz

By: Tamlyn

Tamlyn — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:15:58 +0000

I understand that it's still early alpha days and there's scope for the algorithm to be improved but it's more the approach that bothers me. When I read a blog I expect the links to be well researched and actually useful in the context of the discussion rather than merely on a similar topic. It seems to me that the algorithmic nature of Zemanta is encouraging bloggers to link to stuff just for the sake of it and probably without even reading the target content. If a clear distinction is made between human-selected links and computer-selected links then this becomes less of a concern. For example the 'Related articles' at the end of this post are almost entirely unrelated but at least I know that the links in the body of the post have been hand-picked and presented in an appropriate context.

By: Kelly Dorset

Kelly Dorset — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 09:06:32 +0000

Thanks for the reply Andraz!

I'll get Tam to look deeper at the plugin.

By: andraz

andraz — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:09:48 +0000

Hy from Zemanta!

Actually we try to be the good guys. We suggest stuff that _could_ be added to a blog, but it is up to blogger's taste to decide what and when to link to. We hope to expand the number of destinations we are linking to also.

The post you picked up for reviewing is really linked way to liberally. Will fix that

About the images. We do everything possible to inform the blogger what the restrictions on the image are and then he has to decide. And we only recommend images that should by some general standard be usable by blogger (creative commons, fair use, public domain, promotional...)

And on the long run we hope to automatically learn from the blogger what he personally likes to link and use that knowledge in the engine.

If you have any more ideas, please share them on your blog, via email or at getsatisfaction.com/zemanta where users can discuss the ideas about the service.

Hope to hear from you again, don't give up on us! )

By: Kelly Dorset

Kelly Dorset — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:58:23 +0000

I see what you mean with the inline links. The whole point of the linking is to provide additional context to your blog and therefore to increase its value to the reader.
With Zemanta's linking, it actually can do the opposite, dragging your readers eyeballs away and preventing people from finding your post an enlightening experience.

The image stuff *does* look fun though. Does it *always* return content that is allowed to be used in that context?