Zemanta provides amusement, embellishments for bloggers
Bloggers who may be too pressed for time to find relevant links and images for their posts can now turn to technology. The Zemanta plug-in sifts through possibly relevant material (possibly) for things bloggers can attach to posts.
The Zemanta service, currently in alpha version 0.5.1, shares with many semantic-language products the quality of parsing English like a Roomba vacuum -- getting the job done, more or less, but in a way that'll make you nuts if you watch too closely.
Which is not to say there's not good stuff in there. Zemanta parses the text in individual blog postings, then delves into Wikipedia and various copyright-friendly sources to suggest links and images. Users can also direct Zemanta to sift through their own Flickr accounts, own blogs, and the blogs of friends using Facebook, MyBlogLog and Twitter. The service also understands the black art of search-engine optimization, and makes tag suggestions it feels will improve your post's odds of being found.
At the moment, the service is most "aware" of Wikipedia, and the text we supplied to it came back with links to that service. Being perverse so-and-sos, we found amusement in passing along difficult pieces of text and seeing what the system made of them. For instance, the first stanza of ee cummings' "what if a much of a which of a wind":
what if a much of a which of a wind gives the truth to summer's lie; bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun and yanks immortal stars awry? Blow king to beggar and queen to seem (blow friend to fiend: blow space to time) -when skies are hanged and oceans drowned, the single secret will still be man
The phrase "handed back" (as may be seen in the screen capture below) suggested Wikipedia links to "star," "single (music)," "hanging," "ocean," "begging," and "drowning"; and tag recommendations for "single," "hanging," "business," "begging," "star," "ocean," "kids and teens," and the rather astute suggestion of "philosophy."
The image, on the other hand, remains obscure to us; we examined the image's original tags on Flickr and we're pretty sure the connection is "single," but maybe she's having some sort of existential crisis that applies. We just don't know.
And the primary suggested posts on other blogs were a flat-out mystery -- hanging planters? the perfect Christmas tree? Virgo Love Horoscope for 2009? Several of the secondary choices, however, were posts from music blogs; those matches we liked for our poetry excerpt, and swapping out the astrology foolishness for links to Sigur Ros and Liam Finn write-ups was as simple as clicking on boxes.
It's a little goofy all by itself -- again, have you watched your Roomba lately? -- but when curated by a human hand, Zemanta's got appealing potential to spiff up your blog while you go out and figure out what to actually write in there.
That's the good news. The bad news is that it actually works well enough to truly improve junky blogs -- specifically, the blogs that spammers use to mess with search engines and lure people to their slimy, often malware-ridden sites. But should a tool be criticized simply because the bad guys are going to love it? In any case, hijacking by spammers doesn't appear to be the problem at this stage of development; instead, the Zemanta leads are currently wrestling with questions both obvious (to what sources should the service be linking?) and surprising (how do you keep NSFW images out of the recommendation pool?).
The service is available either via plug-in for blogging platforms that support plug-ins, such as self-hosted WordPress or Movable Type blogs, or via extension for those that do not.