Mission: Upgrading the Blogosphere, One Blog at a Time

We at Zemanta have always been passionate about helping bloggers blog. We know creating content is hard at many steps, and while platforms like WordPress and Movable Type and Blogger.com have made it easy for millions to publish their thoughts online, we noticed there are  very few services that make composing itself easier.

Every professional journalist has a support team of picture editors, proofreaders, taxonomists, backing him to make sure the magazine content is as enjoyable as possible in the end. Zemanta presents such a support team for bloggers. By bloggers, we don’t mean just the ones who aspire to become professionals – our mission is to design products that help everyday bloggers compose richer posts more easily as well.

So what’s composing then and why do we need it? Content lifecycle can be drawn like this:

Blogging made easy /composing:
Composing a blog post comes right after you figured out the story you want to tell and maybe even wrote portions of it, and now you want to make sure it reads well, has supporting elements like illustrations, pictures, sources or further readings, citations in place , and that copyright is cleared on them. You want your blog post to be both, informative and engaging for the readers, so that your ideas get trough completely when you hit the publish button.

We link you all over / distributing:
Now, after the content is published, only half of the work is done. The next big thing is distribution – getting the content to the readers or readers to content.

Yes, the web made this easier as well – we read hundreds of blogs every day trough blog search, RSS readers, aggregation services… But this volume makes getting readers for your writing is harder than ever. Zemanta recommends posts from our users to other users whenever they are relevant, giving them equal opportunity as the big media outlets.

Think of Zemanta as “just-in-time” and “in-context” distribution of content throughout the blogosphere. And we made it possible for you to see how your posts are picked up in your personal statistics within Zemanta preferences.??Zemanta Blogging Assistant: simplicity and visibility

All through this process we put it as our goal to make Zemanta is your personal blogging assistant. We plug into your favorite publishing platform to offer you editorial support where you really need it, and we recommend your content whenever somebody else is writing about similar topics.

Zemanta has many features to make this magic work:

• really simple to use interface,
• kick-ass semantic analysis backend,
• cooperation with RSS readers,
• thousands of trusted content sources and interesting bloggers,
• monthly report on where your posts were picked up.

We try to work by a set of three general guidelines:

• Unobtrusive – our tool should never interfere with what you are trying to do, ideally you’d forget it’s there and just use it as natural part of the authoring process
• Standards compliant – only proper validated HTML where possible
• Open – free for everyone, available on as many platforms as possible

We envision an upgraded blogosphere, where blogging is simple, effective, informative and enriched with engaging related content. We will work hard to fulfill our mission. Upgrading the blogosphere. One blog at a time.

Think we’re on the right track?  Leave a comment or drop us an email!