Andraž Tori, CTO and co-founder of Zemanta stopped by the other day to give us an overview of their product offering.

Zemanta is pitched at content authors  – primarily online journalists and bloggers. The product is available as a free firefox/IE plugin or as an API.

The basic jist of the product is:

1) You write about something

2) Zemanta scans it, understands roughly what you’re on about and dishes up – images, related articles, tags, links and categories alongside your draft content.

3) You then either use the Zemanta results to:

• Further-research your topic before publishing it 
• ‘Accessorise’ your content by: adding images, converting recognised words/entities into links, adding related articles to the bottom of your text

What I liked:

• Intuitive UI – easy to drag/drop related articles into your content, add images from a gallery with click on/off
• Saves time spent researching topics
• Recommends appropriate tags/categories (drag/drop)
• Particularly useful for mass-market / general interest / product-related topics e.g. news / reviews
• The API offers options to integrate/mashup with other products

Related articles:

• Review: Zemanta blog enrichment extension (pluginseo.com)
• improve the way you blog (transitionweb.blogspot.com)
• New Zemanta Wordpress plugin and 2.8 compatibility (zemanta.com)
• Cool Firefox Add-in (polynesianmedic.com)