Zemanta Power User: Ted Curran, Instructional Designer

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Ted Curran is an instructional designer for a health sciences university in Oakland, CA. He blogs about education technology at TedCurran.net and builds WordPress websites for small businesses at ChimeraDesigns.net. Ted has been using Zemanta since 2008 and has been a big fan. We’re thrilled to have him as one of our users and are excited to to tell you more about him.

What do you blog about?
I think of my blog as “Lifehacker for educators”– I give tips, tricks, and free downloads to educators who want to do more with Web 2.0, Learning Management Systems, and free software.

When did you start using Zemanta?
I started using Zemanta in 2008 when I was teaching an 11th & 12th grade Digital Media Arts course and running my whole course on a WordPress.com blog. I immediately appreciated the way Zemanta suggests links for popular online tools so I don’t have to link everything manually. I also love the way it recommends Creative Commons images that fit with my subject matter. This makes it so I don’t have to worry about licensing my images. It made it easy for a busy teacher to provide students with lots of related information that they could explore themselves.

How does Zemanta help you blog better?
Zemanta does a great job of recommending relevant tags, links, and images that make my blog posts richer and more informative for my readers. My favorite feature nowadays is the Related Articles– I love how Zemanta finds other articles online on the same subject matter I write about. This helps enmesh my blog posts in larger online conversations and helps me network with like-minded bloggers who care about these topics too. I’ve found them valuable as a reader, too, helping me broaden my understanding of the topics I write about.Now when I build WordPress websites for clients, I install the Zemanta WordPress plugin so they can easily add pictures and links to their posts.

Power User Tip
I recommend that you feed in all the different blogs you write into Zemanta so they can be recommended to other Zemanta users as related articles. This helps publicize your work. I’d say the geekiest thing I’ve done with Zemanta so far is to add all of my RSS feeds into it so it can aggregate them and give me more relevant, focused suggestions.

Are you a Zemanta power user? Want to be featured on our blog? Please let us know!