innonate

Image via Flickr

Because writing comes rather naturally for me, my time spent blogging is roughly cut up into these chunks:

1. 50% - Writing the article
2. 15% - Hunting down supporting links
3. 10% - Hunting down a suitable header image
4. 25% - Final editing

Today, I stumbled upon a product which promises to make the tediousness of steps 2 & 3 all but go away.

Zemanta is a Firefox plugin which enhances Wordpress, Blogger, and Typepad. As I type this post, the there’s a box right in my Wordpress editing screen which is contextually suggesting images and links to related articles, like the screenshot at the top of this article and the related article by TechCrunch you see below. Additionally, Zemanta provides a list of links to websites and Wikipedia for the subjects I am writing about. For example, the link to Zemanta above was created by clicking on one of these suggested links.

Anyway, if Zemanta can truly make finding links, images, and supporting articles frictionless for me, I think it will make the blogging experience at least 25% more efficient…

… and while that’s sure to add up for me, it could be a game changer for my friends who blog all day, every day.