Zemanta

Image via CrunchBase

Third time lucky, eh? Blogger Buzz suggested what seemed to be a really cool application for Firefox. And from what I've seen, everyone seems to enjoy it and think it's the bee's knees. The application is called Zemanta.

If you knew what it does (or meant to do) you'd probably think 'Why had no-one thought of this earlier. This is genius!'. Imagine this scenario, one that I frequently face. You are writing away and you think 'I need something to jazz this post up a bit.' Perhaps an image here, a link there. Then you think, I will have to trawl through Creative Commons sites (such as Wikipedia) to find the content I want. Then go through the hassle of inserting it, or highlighting the word, and copy and pasting the link. No more, my friends. Zemanta does this for you. I finds the stuff you want and then with just one click it inserts it.

That's the idea anyway. So far I've had limited success. First, the images only go on the right side of the text. Second, you can't preview when Zemanta is activated. Third, if you spell check with Zemanta stuff, everything goes crazy. I'm liking the italics today. Then you get scripting errors. And on my last attempt I managed to select and dump just about everything Zemanta had to offer, wanted or not, onto my blog. Some of this may be the fault of blogger. My dedicated readers (how snobby does that sound? Dedicated readers) will know of my love-hate relationship with blogger. Some of the fault may lie at my doorstep. It wasn't Zemanta's fault that I highlighted and dumped everything, it was doing what I told it to do.

So the jury is still out on Zemanta