Blogging has a fundamental problem - it’s tedious nature. Sure it’s easy to write content, but getting the blog ready for the public eye is simply not fun. Adding hyperlinks, tags, categories and pictures are a lengthy and boring process. As such, I have at least four blogs in my backlog that are completely written but I haven’t optimized with links, pictures and the like. But thanks to my new knight in shining armor (Zemanta) this issue is completely solved.

Zemanta is a simple plugin for FireFox and IE that works on all major blogging platforms. It overlays a bunch of actions overtop of your writing manager on your blog. It suggests tags, related articles, images, links found within your content, as well as offers a “reblog” button (as seen below) that allows visitors to blog about your article in a simple format.

The program uses semantic technology (ooo, semantics my fav!) in order to produce very precise results. I’ve seriously found no problems with this program. It solves exactly what it has set out to do and I’m sure the future of the program is quite optimistic. In conjunction to this the program is open API - I smell mashups! I use this on all my blogs.

I did some basic math on how much time I spend on these activities. I spend roughly twenty minutes a day - researching possible links, images and smart tags for each of my blogs. That translates to 2 hours and 20 minutes a week, 10 hours a month or 120 hours a year (or 5 days). This is just for one of my blogs, I host and run about five blogs which means I lose about 25 days a year tagging, linking and finding images for my blogs. Thank you Zemanta!

The only funding that the company has seen is seed funding of $1.5 million.

My name is Benjamin Walker. I am a nineteen year old communications student at Wilfrid Laurier University. In short I enjoy internet related things. Social networking, web development, search engine optimization, copywriting, hell even the odd porno. Currently, I am interested in the future of Web 3.0.

Internet aside, I am a student looking to get into the realm of marketing and advertising. I am a massive fan of food - like I’m talking any type. Cheeses, dairy and spicy things are of particular interest to me. I enjoy a good comedy. I like movies with actors that were only good before they hit puberty – Haley Joel Osment, Jonathan Lipnicki, Rory and Macaulay Culkin I’m talking about you, shape up. I like to dabble and would consider myself one who dabbles frequently.

What this is, is my inner workings blog. My personal blog, where I will blog about things that catch my blogging eye.