Posted by bostjan, under Industry, releases, zemanta on August 18th, 2010
As of today, Zemanta, the ultimate blogging assistant, is available to all of you as a part of the WordPress.com platform.
We are proud to announce the launch of our partnership with the most advanced and acclaimed blogging platform in the world and we believe that with it we will contribute to better and easier blogging for everyone.
We’ve worked closely with the Automattic team to tailor and optimize the user experience. This integration brings WordPress bloggers our next-generation blogging tool for automatically discovering related articles, in-text links and pictures, to make blogging more efficient, blogger’s life easier and blog posts snazzier.
Please visit the announcement on WordPress blog to learn how to enable Zemanta on your blog. If you are already a Zemanta user on one or more WordPress blogs, feel free to stay the way you are – you are beautiful as it is 
Don’t hesitate to reach out to us with any question, feature requests or other feedback, on our forum or email.
Happy blogging!
Tags: Automattic, Blog, Blogger, Google, tools, WordPress, Wordpress.com, zemanta
Posted by bostjan, under Industry, interview on August 12th, 2010
David Berkowitz is a blogger at Advertising Age’s Digital Next, 360i’s Digital Connections, and MarketingStudio.com, developer of social media and mobile software, and MediaPost author of over 200 columns. His blogging and marketing background has seen him interview 175 technology and business executives, authors, and analysts, and speak at Digital Hollywood, ad:Tech, Blog World Expo, Web 2.0 Expo, Social Ad Summit, and other events.
David, when you hear the term “blogger’s assistant,” what does it mean to you and what do you think it should do?
A blogger’s assistant should take care of all the chores of blogging beyond writing the post itself. For me, that means finding relevant images, curating related posts from my own blog and possibly from around the web, optimizing posts for search engines, and aggregating comments even if they’re not responding directly on the blog.
What bothers you about today’s blogosphere? Which services and tools do you miss or wish to be developed ASAP?
Tools to help with some of the grunt work as mentioned above would help. Some other curation tools would be interesting as well, like if I could easily gather some of the most interesting posts from across my favorite blogs, especially the blogs of a number of my friends. I’d love some degree of intelligence based on the blogs most closely aligned with mine.
What did you think was the most innovative use of social media in the past year, and what was the most interesting project you’d worked on?
I think a lot of the most innovative uses of social media are the unsung ones, especially from the public sector. The NYC BigApps contest , one of many great examples from federal, state, and local levels, is a fantastic use of crowdsourcing. Many of the most interesting projects I’ve been involved with this year include mobile social initiatives, built on technologies like Stickybits and SCVNGR. I can’t name names right now but I should have some fun things to talk about soon.
Tags: Advertising Age, Business, David Berkowitz, Digital Hollywood, Marketing and Advertising, MediaPost, NYC BigApps, Social media, Web search engine
Posted by bostjan, under Industry, zemanta on August 9th, 2010
We’re one month into summer and one month into having Zemanta gadget part of Blogger.com, making blogging easier and more effective for users of the Google’s blogging platform. (Go get it here if you haven’t yet!
As we joint forces with Blogger.com, the Zemanta family grew for 50% in the first month alone and the growth curve has not yet began to show signs of settling. This is good news for everyone! As the network of Zemanta users expands, so does the pool of user produced content that contributes to our engines search for relevant suggestions. And we can recommend their posts to more other bloggers, strengthening the flow of content in the blogosphere. Knowledge sharing and connecting is becoming more and more efficient.
Typically in the summer people blog less often and less bloggers maintain frequent contact with their vacationing audiences. However our numbers show, that Zemanta users on Blogger.com still post an average of 2 blogs per month despite the heat and summer parties, and we are curious to see how this productivity curve will spike when we get off the heat wave. Our previous numbers show that blogging productivity rises with the easing of the research process and Zemanta users across channels averaged a steady 8 blogs per month.
Zemanta has been partnering with Blogger.com for over a year (as they nicely outlined in their newsletter) to provide new users with the most effortless experience of blogging so far available to them and we are happy to see that the adoption rates show we were headed in the right direction.
Let us know what your average is and did using Zemanta change your productivity curve?
Tags: Blog, Blogger, blogger.com, Blogosphere, FAQs Help and Tutorials, Google, Search Engines, zemanta
Posted by bostjan, under tutorial on August 5th, 2010
What are tags in the first place? They’re the words that usually appear just below the blog post, categories that the post is supposed to belong to, words the blogger had used to describe the post. Without tags, active blogs are nigh useless for anyone but the most faithful follower.
Here’s a painful experience we have daily: it’s probably happened to you before – you’re googling for something and come across a blog that discusses it; so you follow the link and then fall into a wall-of-text-and-images-that-keep-opening-and-moving-the-text-just-as-you-begin-reading-it. So you want to narrow down your focus. And there are two ways to do it: you either narrow down the time period to a single month or you search for a single category; but you don’t know when the thing you’ve been looking for had been posted – so if there are no categories or tags, you’re stuck with your browser’s “find” function (and the blog that still hasn’t loaded completely and keeps updating as you try to read it).
Enough ranting. Your blog is not like that, is it? Its archives are neatly organized into months and you realize hundreds of high-def photos crammed into a single page are just bad etiquette. So why should you use tags?
For one thing, they help search engines and aggregation services understand what your post is about. Because although search engines have evolved immensely, at the fundamental level they basically still just look at the text of your page. So if you talk about Germany and Spain and Miroslav Klose and his goals against Argentina, but neglect to mention the words “2010”, “FIFA”, “World” and “Cup”, search engines are going to gloss right over your post in this regard. With tags and categories, you can help them understand that “Germany”, “Spain” and “Miroslav Klose” are not just some unrelated words that happen to appear in the same post, but are rather connected by a common concept, i.e. the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
And if the search engines understand what your post is about, they can send more and more targeted traffic to your blog. It’s simple, really. You not only get people searching for “Germany” or “Argentina”, but also people searching for other more general terms like “2010 FIFA World Cup” and other tags you used for your post like “soccer” (or “football”, as the case might be). And finally, better targeted traffic also means better ads. What does that mean? – That the ads Google puts on your blog are relevant to your visitors’ interests – or at least get closer to being relevant than they would have otherwise. I can’t think of a football/soccer-related example at the moment, but I recall one time when I was looking for something music-related and the word “track” (as in “album track” et al.) was featured prominently on the page … And the ads? They were for aluminum curtain tracks. Quite amusing, but ultimately useless. And that’s the sort of thing you can avoid if you use tags. If the page/post had been tagged as “music”, Google might have served me ads that would have been more relevant to my interests. And of course, ads relevant to your visitors’ interests translate into higher revenue for you and your blog.
So what does all this have to do with Zemanta? – Zemanta can make sure all your posts are tagged, reasonably accurately, without you having to lift your finger. Sure, there are times when you want to be creative with your tags, use them to spell things out or be funny (e.g. Slashdot’s whatcouldpossiblygowrong); but there are also times (which probably come about more frequently) when you simply want your tags to be useful and accurate. That’s where Zemanta comes in, tagging your posts automatically, making sure your content is organized and easy to access, and thus sending more traffic to your blog and giving you better ads, leaving you free to use the time you saved as you please.
Tags: 2010 FIFA World Cup, Association football, Blog, Blogging, Google, Soccer, Sports, tagging, World Cup, zemanta
Posted by bostjan, under conferences on July 19th, 2010
In the excitement that is building up around the coming Monday and Tuesday in L.A., we welcome the first contribution to the Zemanta blog, coming from Greg, our only professional biz-dev guy. He’s just getting warmed up, so expect to hear more from him in the future 
…
At Zemanta our core mission is to connect bloggers to relevant and awe inspiring content. Zemanta bloggers are a social bunch who love information. More so, they are influencers in their respective communities, sharing content via our plug-in as well as their Twitter and Facebook feeds. To that end, we are always on the look out for great sites to recommend. And I am in the fortunate position to help build these publisher partnerships.
Giving our bloggers the best information means reaching out to the best publishers across the web. For this reason, Zemanta is excited to announce we will be sponsoring the BlueGlass Conference in Los Angeles next week. Made up of leading authorities in the online space, BlueGlass and it’s conference is dedicated to helping publishers get their message in front of the right audience by leveraging search and social media. Top publishers like The New York Times will be attending. We want to introduce Zemanta as a way for them to get their content in front of our influential bloggers through contextual targeting.
Publishers today are generating massive amounts of content. We want to help them to reach the blogosphere, targeting our bloggers and their communities. If we can help publishers reach bloggers who are genuintely interested in their content, and at the same time, provide interesting articles and images to our bloggers – we think we are fulfilling our mission.
Zemanta is excited and honored to be sponsoring such a great conference. I will be sharing with everyone how powerful the Zemanta blogger is and doing my best to attract the most awe inspiring content for you to share with your community.
Tags: Blog, Blogger, Facebook, Los Angeles, Online Communities, Social network, Twitter, zemanta
Posted by bostjan, under releases on July 2nd, 2010
Today we are proud to announce Zemanta just became available as a native Blogger Gadget to millions of blogger.com users! No extensions, no plugins, just click here to add gadget and your personal blogging assistant is ready to go.
We all admire blogger.com for it’s great contribution to making blogs popular and mainstream. Initially a simple yet powerful platform they managed to appeal to the widest audience and becoming a member of the Google family enabled them to stay focused on what’s best for their users.
Zemanta was lucky to be working directly with the Blogger team in making sure the experience is great and tailored to blogger.com users’ expectations. We hope you’ll like it, and don’t hesitate to give us a shout with your thoughts.
Happy blogging!
Tags: Blog, Blogger, blogger.com, FAQs Help and Tutorials, Google, Plug-in (computing), tools, zemanta
