Test Blog using Zemanta plug-in beta for WLW 2010 Beta

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For those, who blog, or maybe are thinking of starting, I’d recommend a plugin for Windows Live Writer (and many other blogging platforms) called ZEMANTA. In short, this plugin will scour the text content of your blog and suggest (via a side panel) links to various related content from around the web-o-sphere. It even provided related photographs too. And, if that’s not enough, it’ll link to your Facebook and Flickr account for relevant content too!

Here we are then. I’ve installed the beta version of the Zemanta plug-in. The first thing I noticed was that I didn’t get the ‘this version of Zemanta is not compatible…’ when loading WLW 2010 beta –  so that’s a good start.  Note however, the plug-in now doesn’t load at all when I launch the previous version of Live-Writer – WLW 2009 on the same PC.

So now I’m typing text and deliberately dropping in some keywords hoping that Zemanta will pick them up and offer some links in its side-panel.

It’s certainly picking up related articles automatically – see below

Now, an opportunity for Zemanta to try and provide related links based on stuff specific to me. Here we go then: I’m adding in the names of our two cats, Biscuit and Bon-Bon to see if Zemanta finds the photographs stored in my Flickr account. Nope! That’s weird because it HAS selected a photograph from my Flickr account of Ann and me (not sure WHY though!) – no wait, the cat pics have just appeared, so maybe it’s because of my painfully sloooooooow internet connection. (about 0.5 Mb/s).

Next, I’m going to add the name of my new camera here in the body text – Panasonic Lumix G2 – Well, that sort of worked, Zemanta has picked up on the Lumix part…but not found anything relating to G2.  I wonder if there is a way of linking the two words in the search – I’m going to try the refine button in Zemanta by typing in Lumix G2. Success! – Zemanta has found loads of photos specifically for the Lumix G2 – one is shown on the left

Finally, I’m going to try out the in-text link option of Zemanta. This is where the plug-in searches through all the text in your blog and offers related links to that word from across the Web. Interestingly, whilst it found links to Flickr, Zemanta, Lumix, photographs, WLW, beta version and body text,  it didn’t find any links for Panasonic – strange!  Ohh, wait a mo’ – I came back to the blog 10 minutes later and there’s a link to Panasonic. Once again, it must be my connection speed.

So, with the above results, all in all, I’d give the plugin beta the ‘thumbs-up’ –  it does do a superb job of making the most of your posts!