Techno Tuesday: Zemanta

I'm always on the lookout for things to make my life easier.  Anything that helps me save time on a particular task and thus, cram more stuff into my day is certainly going to catch my attention.  So when I bumped into a little tool called Zemanta, I was immediately intrigued.

Zemanta is a blogging tool that makes it ridiculously easy to add pictures, links, articles, and other related content to your posts.  Rather than having to search the internet for a relevant photo or a site to link to, Zemanta does the searching for you.  Right there in a little box beside your editor.  Like this:

To the right are relevant photos and articles.  You can mouse-over each to get a preview, and if you decide to add it to your post, all you have to do is click.  It couldn't be easier.

What about links?  Easy peasy.  As you type, Zemanta also hunts down links for you and plops them down beneath your editor window.  And again, all you have to do to add them is click.  And if Zemanta finds more than one link, you'll be offered a drop down menu, so you can decide exactly where to link to.  For instance, right now, I could link to Zemanta's website, their blog, even their entry in Wikipedia.  And if you're not sure which site is right, you can click to visit the site before you link there.  Cool, huh?

Zemanta will even suggest tags for your entry, which is great if you're like me and hate sitting there trying to think up tags on your own. 

Oh, but the awesomeness doesn't stop there.  In addition to being a great tool for writing your posts, Zemanta also helps you promote your blog!  How?  Well, once you're all set up, you can add your blog to Zemanta's database, which means that it will then pull relevant content from your blog for you and for other users, making it super simple for people to link to your blog.  And that's definitely a good thing.

But there must be a downside, you say.  It's probably a pain to install, you think.  Wrong!  I can't speak for other platforms and browsers, but it was a piece of cake to install the Zemanta Add-on for Firefox, and it works fantastically with Blogger. 

So what are you waiting for?  Give Zemanta a try, and make your blogging life easier.  'Cuz the less time you spend writing blog posts, the more time you can spend crafting!  And that's what it's really all about, right?  Right.