Zemanta is a superb recommendation tool for blogs – we’ve bee using it here on Creative Agency Secrets for years after seeing it on David Cushman’s blog.  Its easy to use, helps us create professional content in minutes and best of all enables our content to feed back to other blog sites.

What gave you the idea for Zemanta?

My co-founder and I were working on a project for national TV as journalists, we noticed that professional media journalists have a huge machinery of assistance and research, proofreaders and picture editors to ensure the article they write at the end is perfect.

An individual blogger has none of this.  He is on his own.

At the time, blogging was becoming an important media channel online.  By using smart technologies we could create a similar experience for a blogger as a professional jounalist.

We did a proof of concept and we raised angel funding.  Version 1 got seed funding and launched.

From day one every blogger who tried it totally liked it.  We got rave reviews calling Zemanta the “blogging god”.

In 3 years we have almost no complaints or people saying it is useless.

What does Zemanta do?

Zemanta is your friend that helps you tell a story on the internet in the most interesting way.  By listening closely to your ideas  you type in the blog post draft, Zemanta finds pictures and explanations to illustrate what you want to say. By looking at other ideas that are similar to yours Zemanta lets you know where they are and how they connect.   You then click and drag them into the post draft as images, related content, links and so on.

What are the main features of Zemanta?

People are excited about how much time it saves and discovering content that they didn’t know about before. Every blogger who uses it has the right to share his blog content into our network to become recommended quotes for other bloggers creating cross-promotion that wasn’t possible before.

How many bloggers use Zemanta?

Tens of thousands.

How is it useful for business bloggers?

It is even more important that business blog posts look professional and are set out and featured as a professional article would be with references, illustrations and pictures. Creating a “rich” post is even more important.

At the same time business blogs have more interest in being promoted on other blogs as references and bringing in more traffic.

What is your business model to make money?

Two ways – we offer our core technology as an API,to clients like Flight Share and Lonely Planet, who want to categorise their content.

Promoted recommendations is the second method of monetization; some businesses who are not our users would still like to contribute content to us so we charge them based on the number of times we recommend their stuff.

Their stuff is of core value so it goes into the same recommendation engine but when it displays, the word ‘promoted’ is next to the link.  Yahoo Finance is our largest client for this service.

Take the Zemanta demo yourself – post any text into the box and watch the images, tags and related content recommendations display for you.  Suggestion – use one of your recent blog posts as the text!

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