Zemanta is not for me

After six weeks of struggling to get any value out of Zemanta, I’ve now dumped it. The Firefox extension and the Windows Live Writer extension have both been deleted from all three of my computers.

Zemanta is a bit like having a friend looking over your shoulder while you are blogging and making suggestions about how your post could be improved. It analysis your text as you write. Then it delves into a huge picture database to find images that are tagged with the words you use. At the same time, it searches web sites looking for similar-ish news stories and posts which relate to the words your write about. Finally, it suggests possible Technorati tags to use in your posts.

This sounds great. And in theory it could be great. The problem is, if Zemanta was your friend, he or she would quickly wear out their welcome and quickly become an irritant. That’s because there’s something seriously wrong with the suggestions Zemanta makes—the problem is right across the board but it is particularly bad with images.

During my time with Zemanta it suggested dozens of images for each post. Few, if any, were usable. In fact, few, if any, were even vaguely relevant. Many were surreal. This is my 51st post. In my previous 50, Zemanta only managed six plausible choices. Two of them were logos I could have found easily myself. One was a generic shot that I used out of desperation. So, in round numbers I’d say Zemanta could only find an acceptable image for one post in ten.

I suspect Zemanta only has access to a limited database because the same pictures kept appearing in the suggestions again and again—although to be fair, I am blogging about a fairly narrow subject that doesn’t easily lend itself to illustration.

These problems are not as pronounced for the links. Zemanta suggests in-post links for certain words and after-post links to related news or newsy stories. The in-post links are mainly to Wikipedia or to company sites. For example, mention IBM and Zemanta suggests both the Wikipedia entry for IBM and the company’s home page. To me, this isn’t really useful unless there’s some benefit in providing lots of outgoing links on a blog post that I’m not aware of. The news links aren’t too bad, but many were badly out of date.

Zemanta claims its software “makes blogging fun again”. Well maybe it does for some people, but in my experience it makes blogging more frustrating than it needs to be. Maybe it will improve in a future incarnation. I hope so, because the idea behind Zemanta is good, sadly the current implementation and the data it has access to lets things down from my point of view.

In the interests of fairness, here are some alternative takes on the software:

Zemanta Adds Blog Ephemera Web Worker Daily

A Second Look at Evernote, Joint Contact, Backboard, Retaggr and Zemanta Also from Web Worker Daily

Zemanta Brings a Semantic Layer to Your Blog Read Write Web

Zemanta For Bloggers? Good Idea, Bad Idea, Or Great Idea?