Z-Blog

Thanks to all of your votes, Zemanta made it into final round of Mashable Open Web Awards. One more voting time and we can make Zemanta the best blogging plugin of year!

Voting is easy. Just enter your email address and wait for link to arrive. You can vote once a day until December 14th.

Feed readers, click here to get directly to the blog and vote from there.

Zemanta is a free blogging add-on that recommends you content while you write. This case study presents how bloggers who mention books in their blog posts can increase fidelity of their posts as well as easily add affiliate codes for Amazon.com.

Benefits while blogging about books and their authors:

• We can recommend over 1.1 million books
• Recognition and automatic linking to writer’s Wikipedia page and homepage (when known)
• Amazon.com integration - linking to Amazon.com listing for book and inclusion of book cover
• Amazon.com affiliate support
• Related articles from a wide selection of book bloggers

How does it work?

1. Install Zemanta for free from http://www.zemanta.com/download . Zemanta supports Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad, LiveWriter and 7 other platforms.

2. Log-in into your blog platform and start writing, you’ll see an extra widget right-side to your text editor, where recommendations will appear:

Zemanta recommendations for Yann Martel - Life of Pi

3. Start writing. Lets say you want to talk about a novel about Yann Martel:

This week, I’ve decided to pick up a book called Life of Pi by Yann Martel. It’s a wonderful story about a boy stranded on a raft with a hyena, an orangutan, an injured zebra and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.

You just enter it into your blog and recommendations will appear:

Zemanta recommendations for Yann Martel - Life of Pi

4. Clicking on them will automatically make them part of your blog post:

Applied Zemanta recommendations

5. After publish, you’ll have a blog post with hyperlinks, articles to others writing about same book and image cover. If you want you can also insert multiple images, so you can start the review with book cover and finish with image of author.

Published blog with Zemanta recommendations

6. Optionally you can also set up your Amazon.co affiliate account in Preferences. Then all the Amazon links and covers will automatically include it in the link.

Zemanta Amazon.com Affiliate ID

Related articles to connect to other blogs

While you write your review, Zemanta finds related articles to your blog posts. This means that we’ll find reviews from other bloggers, blog posts from their publishers and often also from the book author. Of course they need to blog, so we can find them. Zemanta is already tracking more than 500 book bloggers and more than 300 authors blogs.

On top of that, bloggers can also setup their own list of blogs to follow and we’ll make sure to recommend posts from there. This way it’s really easy to link to reviews of your friends, without having to search all of their blogs.

Example of related articles for Life of Pi review

Examples of enhancements from existing Zemanta users:

Cover via Amazon

Seth Godin, author of short, mind-altering books like “Permission Marketing” and now “Tribes,” stated something in a recent interview that everyone should ponder: “[T]he market and the internet don’t care if you make money.”

To me, this is an important statement because I believe, fundamentally, we (publishers, librarians, educators, and others) think people do care if we make money, do care if our budgets are sufficient to pursue our normal activities, do care if we have the resources to do what we’ve mastered.

But they don’t.

[By Kent Anderson, They Don’t Care!]

Cover of The God Delusion

I don’t normally link to the World Nut Daily, but I could not resist this story. 22-year-old Jesse Kilgore killed himself. His family and friends blame a college biology course and the Richard Dawkins book ‘The God Delusion‘. They claim Kilgore was an passionate Christian apologist who lost his faith. They point to his blogging as proof of his faith.

[By Mojoey, Dad links son's suicide to 'The God Delusion']

In the spirit of Thanksgiving that’s going on at our friends in the United States, we’d also like to say a big thank you to all our users and bloggers who took time and wrote a review on their blog. We try to answer everyone personally and also provide helpful tips to any comments in the blogs.

Keeping up with tradition of playing nice in the blogosphere, we’re leaving each one a trackback

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Keeping busy with changes in the world, we’d like to share with you some developments we’ve made. In this release, we’ve focused mainly on improving recommendations and integrating new databases, together with adding Wordpress 2.7 support.

New databases

• MusicBrainz - probably biggest database of music information. It allows us to do two things: recommend links to MusicBrainz and also recommend Amazon CD’s and Cover art. Yes, we’re now also recommending music CD’s, not just books!

• ITIS - Integrated Taxonomic Information System - Authoritative taxonomic information on plants, animals, fungi, and microbes of North America and the world.
• NCBI - National resource for Molecular Biology Information.

Zemanta running on Wordpress 2.7 with Amazon Album Cover

Wordpress 2.7

As most of the Wordpress users know, Automattic is working hard at their next version of blogging platorm. Wordpress 2.7 radically change the dashboard interface. We’ve adjusted our software to work with new version and also tought Zemanta Wordpress Plugin a few new tricks regarding debug support.

Remember that Wordpress 2.7 is stil in development. We’ll try to track their developement branch, but if something breaks, let us know and we’ll try to fix it.

Zemanta got into second round of Mashable Open Web Awards. This time, everyone can vote once every 24h.

To vote, just enter your email address below, and click on the links that you’ll get in your mail.

Visit our blog, if you’re reading this through RSS feed to see the voting widget.

Thanks!

With NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) at the middle, a lot of us bloggers are wondering where to get that one more idea for a blog post. Where to take the inspiration from?

Defalult Zemanta Pictures at the time of writing

Luckily for us, Luke Gedeon, presented an excellent idea - use default Picture in Zemanta. He writes:

So why am I telling you about this? Because I happen to know a few people who are having trouble thinking of something to blog about. Here is my idea: Install Zemanta (or get me to do it for you) and then pick your favorite each day and tell why you like it, or use the pictures as inspiration for a post. That is what happened with the Zebra post yesterday. Try it. I will be fun!
Source: Pictures from Zemanta

Mr. Wizard then took this idea and ran with it even further:

I thought I’d put a little spin on the idea and write a haiku:

Source: Zemanta default picture suggestion haiku Read the haiku on the blog.

It’s now up to you to either use the initial screen image for inspirational blog post or even as initial idea generator for a haiku.