Why Zemanta, The Blogger’s Helper, Sucks

Oh, and this section concerned me as well. I don’t like people taking my content in perpetuity.

You understand that Zemanta ltd. can retain a copy of the submited content. Copy will not be retained only in the case when Zemanta Browser Extension submits the content of e-mail message from the mail composer view. Zemanta can without exception retain a copy of the metadata and content enhancements submitted by you or that generated by the Zemanta service. By submitting content to or generating metadata, content and content enhancements through the Zemanta service, you grant Zemanta ltd. a non-exclusive perpetual, sublicensable, royalty-free license to that metadata. From a privacy standpoint, Zemanta ltd. use of this metadata and content enhancements is governed by the terms of the Zemanta ltd. and Zemanta Privacy Statements.

I was encouraged with the video on the Zemanta.com website about it’s functionality. However, before installing the Firefox plugin I did read the EULA. I didn’t care for the restrictions on links back to Zemanta being a certain type and images a certain size. You also, according to the EULA, couldn’t resize or otherwise change those links.

Personally, I think one link in the sidebar or footer saying “Some content provided by Zemanta” would acceptable. Due to the language of the EULA and the rights I would give up I am not able to install or otherwise use a product that looks like it would enhance how I blog.

Good idea. Too restrictive EULA.

I tried it once and I seen that it was trying to take over.
Also the pictures Give Duplicate content I don’t need pictures
on every post anyway yes Zemanta Sucks I prefer Sphere for
Related content and it does one job good.Zementa seem to just
do a little too much.

We need a plugin developer to build a similar wordpress plugin, but more flexible.
For instance: the ability to decide the sources of links, images, and so on!
ciao!

Thanks for letting me know. I will check it out.

Hi,

just wanted to let you know we just had a new release, now we integrated CrunchBase, so IT/web scene is really well covered in Zemanta now.

Also available is Windows Live Writer plugin at https://www.zemanta.com/download

Feedback Welcome!

Valid points indeed.

We insert the image there, to be able to discover blogs so we can add them to our aggregation engine, for recommendations to others (only public blogs with RSS that is).

The reblog images gets inserted only when you use any of our recommendations. So if you delete it, and don’t use any of recommendations, it’s not going to get inserted back.

I’ve checked your last post about Java, there we find reference to Java programming language, and our first link is indeed to java.sun.com. I’m not sure why that didn’t work for you when you used it, but it works now and we’re working on adding even more databases for more links right now.

I’m sorry that we didn’t satisfy your expectations. Hopefully you’ll try us again in future with our new releases.

Jure Cuhalev, Zemanta

Hi Jure,
Thanks for your response. Here’s what I found.

> You can turn it off using Preferences, if you don’t want that behavior.

I couldn’t find that option anywhere. I could however find 4 REBLOG buttons and 3 ZEMIFIED buttons (whatever that means) and one with hidden image. First of all where in options can I turn it off?
Secondly why insert a hidden image in our post content?

You mention in your preferences that you can “simply delete it before posting”. Unfortunately as I found and you concurred that is not easily possible to delete it.

I understand your concern about providing copyrighted images. My concern is that the images provided are mostly not context sensitive. It would be better not to provide any images rather than provide irrelevant images.

As for Wikipedia as the basis. If I am searching for Java, I expect link to java.sun.com and not wikipedia entry on Java. That doesn’t make any sense. More authentic links should be used when available. Your defaulting to Wikipedia for non-available normative sources do not bother me much. It bothers me hugely when you don’t link to obvious references and instead chose to solely use wikipedia.

> Overall there are situations where Zemanta works really well, and situations where it gets totally confused. If you tell us about such situations,

Well this is a technical blog and as far as I can see it doesn’t work well at all here.

Thanks for responding.

Best,
Angsuman

Thanks for giving Zemanta a try and sharing your thoughts, so we can improve it

I’ll just address each of your points:

- The Reblog button is there, with an idea that it allows other bloggers to easily reference parts of your blog in their blog, with a proper attribution and back-linking.

You can turn it off using Preferences, if you don’t want that behavior.

We’re re-inserting it into the post, because of the technical reasons, we currently have no way to know if the button was removed accidently or on purpose. I’ll ask the engineers to rethink this, if this could be possible.

According to all the evidence, we don’t see any ill-effect of this on Google Search.

- Image suggestions are very context sensitive, but sometimes we get the context wrong or there are no good free images out there.

The difference from Google Images search is that we’re suggesting you only images that Creative commons licensed or otherwise free to use on your blogs (like Getty images with proper attribution). As such we can’t do google image search, as this would then mean that you’re including copyrighted images which could in turn mean trouble for you, and also for us as we’d help with copyright infringement process.

- Linking to Wikipedia. Each contextual tool needs a source of “knowledge about the world”. In our case we’re using Wikipedia, as a basis. This means that most of the links will have Wikipedia page as a basis. As we go along we’re expanding this links whenever we can, and now we also suggest you IMDB, Amazon, Google Maps, YouTube and homepages links. They’re not there always, but they’re present a pretty high percentage of links. In these cases the default link is not to Wikipedia but to other web properties.

In next few months we’ll introduce a couple of more databases, as well as slowly starting to learn how other bloggers link and be able to suggest depending on that.

—

Overall there are situations where Zemanta works really well, and situations where it gets totally confused. If you tell us about such situations, we happily investigate this further and improve the underlaying algorithms to work better.

Thanks again for giving us a try, we’ll work on improving the engine, so maybe we’ll be able to help your blogging one day.

Jure Cuhalev, Zemanta