Zemanta, easier / better blogging?

Image via CrunchBase

I've noticed Zemanta at other sites once or twice before, particularly with related article recommendations at the bottom of posts, but being busy with other things didn't explore it. With this 30 posts in 30 days effort, and my personal ambition to not spend so long (hours/days/unending) creating a post... I wonder whether Zemanta will prove useful.  Students in CULLB602C@UB might like to take a look too.

It came back to my attention via Blogger Buzz, although I'm not sure how I landed there (and I do hate not remembering my backtrail). The following quote came from Zemanta's reblog feature that you can now see bottom right of this post. Options with reblog are to publish or copy code, I'd prefer a save as draft option. In the quote Rick is talking about how the add-on works:

Here's how it works: while you write your blog post in Blogger, Zemanta opens up a sidebar next to the Blogger post editor. After you've written a few sentences, Zemanta analyzes the words in your post and suggests images and video that are relevant to your post; with one click, it inserts them into your post. Rick Klau, Blogger Buzz: Zemanta helps you "blog smarter", Jun 2009

The whole article is worth a read.

It was very quick to get started, takes a little longer to optimise - at least optimising is what I was trying to do by adding my blog and rss feeds with preferences, only now I'm not receiving any content recommendations. Oh well, must go shopping for gear for the trip so will look again next time.