Z-Blog

A word about Reblog

Posted by jure, under blogging experience on July 30th, 2008

The core idea of Zemanta is to make blogging easier. While we try to do this by working on our contextual suggestions, we often notice unexplored area where bloggers are asking for someone to fill them, and make their blogging experience.

Reblog is one such byproducts. The core idea is that giving a correct and fair attribution to other blogs, while quoting a bit from them, is hard. It requires copying piece of text, styling it differently, giving a nice back-link with possibly name of author and blog, additionally expanding it with published date.

When you use Zemanta, we add a little button at the bottom of the posts, saying Reblog, this allows anyone to click on it to get a nice citing interface:

Reblog button

Reblog button

Initial Reblog quote selection

Initial Reblog quote selection

Preview and publish to your blog

Preview and publish to your blog

In the last step you can then preview the final post and publish it to your blog. If you don’t feel like this is the end or would rather just copy and paste the text, we also give your raw HTML version of the blog post.

To enable others to easily quote you with proper attribution, just Get Zemanta, and that’s it.

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  • I just discovered Zemanta via AVC.com, and it kicks ass! Great job guys.
  • First of all, I love Zemanta. I have been using it almost the whole time it has existed. I had to manually tag something on Zazzle yesterday and it was just plain weird that Zemanta couldn't do it for me.
    I do have a question about the pixie/reblog button. I am using the WordPress plugin and since I use Zemanta for all my posts, is there a way I can just have to Reblog button relocated somewhere else (preferably next to the Sharethis button right under the posts) and not have the pixie pop up in the content area?
  • raincoaster
    I love Zemanta, but have found the very useful pixie reblog feature to be abused by blog scrapers, who steal (instead of a snippet) the entire post. Other than trackbacks and Google searches, is there a way to prevent or deal with this unintended side-effect?
  • andraz
    Zemanta reblog feature cannot be used for scrapping entire post, since it always requires user to choose one single paragraph when he tries to reblog. I think the scrappers you are seeing aren't using Reblog, but are doing plain copy&paste or copying from your feed. Naturally I might be wrong, so if you have any indicator they really are using reblog somehow, let me know.

    Independently from the above, you can easily change reblog button to one saying "Zemified" or to invisible one inside your Zemanta Preferences. This way there will be no Zemanta Reblog functionality available for your post.

    bye
    Anrdaz Tori, CTO at Zemanta
  • raincoaster
    Thanks. I concluded the Zemanta feature was involved because it's the only post that's been scraped recently and it is the only one with the pixie on it. Perhaps I was wrong; I do see you can choose only one paragraph at a time.

    In any case, they took the post down and are now snipping only one line at a time from the other blogs they're referencing.
    http://raincoaster.com/2009/12/29/madblogz-make...

    Thanks for your quick reply.
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