Z-Blog

After a few months of networking on Twitter, Facebook or MyBlogLog, it’s easy to get hundreds of friends and “friends” that you want to keep in touch with. After a while, you also notice that they’re really interesting people also in online world or that you’ve had great conversations and adventures that you want to blog about them.

So now the big question is: how can I make this blogging easier and faster?

Problem 1: Properly linking to your friend’s profile or blog:

example Zemanta avatar recommendations

It’s polite to link to your friend’s blog as it faciliates more traffice to them and also gives proper attribution to their ideas or even presence. Remember, links are currency of blogs.

With help of Zemanta you can just write their Twitter name, like @ruph and we’ll link to them if you follow them on Twitter. We can also recognize your Facebook friends like: Andraz Tori and MyBlogLog connections: Tilly McLain.

It doesn’t have to be just link to their social network, as we’ll also recommend links to the pages that they’ve selected as their own in their profiles and even show you their avatars if you feel like including them.

Problem 2: Figuring out if your friends blogged about your topic before

Linking between blogs is important, as it’s fundamental driver of conversations. With a little help of trackbacks, it’s also possible to see how ideas and opinions evolved through the blogosphere.

example of Zemanta tracking your friends feeds

To make this process easier, Zemanta allows you to track RSS feeds of your friends blogs. This allows me to just write about the things that interest me, and we’ll automatically recommend posts from their blog.

Example would be me writing about gaming trends:

For a while now, I’ve been observing some interesting gaming trends. Industry is changing in a way that allow more casual and older gamers in, making it accessible to wider range of people.

I can then include a related article from my friend @tomazstolfa:

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Future of Gaming is Bright – Video Gaming Trends

It doesn’t have to be in this form either. If you select a piece of text and click on related article it’s going to hyperlink that part, like: Great Web trends Post.

Additional benefit of such linking is that you’ll generate trackbacks to these blogs, notifying your friends or other authors of your own blog post about connected topic. This will then facilitate conversations in your blog comments or via new blog post on their blog.

If you don’t believe us, take a look at a few reviews from existing users how Zemanta helps them save time and increase traffic:

• I’d boldly say this addon has reduced the time I take to blog by around 20% – 25%.
• Zemanta browses the Internet for related pictures and links you can add to your post. We all know that 50% of a blog post is searching for pictures and links to link the words you want, but Zemanta makes it really easy for you.
• Traffic it’s just amazing, zemanta increased almost 15% of my whole traffic for past 3 months!

About Zemanta

Zemanta is a free Plugin and Browser extension for your blog. It supports WordPress, Blogger, TypePad and 8 other major platforms. It recommends blogger friendly content while you write, making blogging faster and easier.

You can download it now or try a live demo.