VentureBeat

Zemanta, a Slovenian company that uses semantic technology to assist bloggers and other online publishers, has unveiled a set of new features that should make it far more useful to professional users.

Available as a browser extension or direct plugin for publishing platforms like WordPress, Zemanta provides suggestions for links, pictures and images as you write. This evening, it’s adding the ability to customize and add preferences to the content it suggests.

The plugin as it already exists is useful tool for bloggers because, after writing, finding associated content to add to posts and articles is the most time-consuming aspect of online publishing. Zemanta taps into image sources (like Flickr) or content (like articles on related news) to vastly speed the hunt-and-peck process of adding links, images and tags.

But those features weren’t particularly useful to pro bloggers or publishers, because each has their own in-house requirements. VentureBeat, for example, has plenty of past coverage to tap into; if I want to mention Zemanta’s launch, I want the link to point to our own article, not an article somewhere else. Other publications may have in-house photo databases or other sources they need to use.

The company is working on ways to allow as much customization as possible, and will likely charge publishers a subscription fee for it. For Zemanta’s free tool, co-founder Bostjan Spetic says that there will be a different monetization strategy. One possibility is suggesting affiliate products for posts, so that if you wrote on your personal blog about your Canon SLR, Zemanta might provide an affiliate sales link.

Also slated for future release is an API, which Spetic says test developers are comparing to OpenCalais, financial publishing giant ThompsonReuter’s in-house semantic project.

Zemanta also just took more than $650,000 in seed funding (although some different amounts were reported at the time). It has taken $1.5 million to date, and Spetic says the company will be looking for a full venture round by the middle of next year.

Updated

Zemanta says it can make the arduous job of blogging a little easier by suggesting relevant content worth linking to or adding to your posts. It looks like well-known blogger and venture capitalist Fred Wilson has been making good use of the tool — Wilson’s firm Union Square Ventures just announced it’s investing an undisclosed seed round in the startup. [Update: Zemanta now says the financing was for nearly $750,000.]

Wilson describes Zemanta as “AdWords for content creators.” Like AdWords (Google’s advertising program), Zemanta’s technology scans the words on a page and makes suggestions about what’s relevant — except in Zemanta’s case, it isn’t recommending ads. Here’s how it works: Every 300 words into a post, Zemanta analyzes the content of your post, then recommends other blog posts, articles, images and videos via a sidebar. It even automates most of the process of linking, posting and crediting outside content. It works as a plug-in for blogging platforms such as WordPress and Movable Type; plus, if you’re using a platform that isn’t supported, it works as an extension for the Firefox and Internet Explorer web browsers.

Overall, the product sounds like a great idea — linking and adding other media can feel like time-consuming distractions when I’m writing VentureBeat posts, so anything that helps is welcome. In fact, I just downloaded Zemanta and look forward to giving it a shot. Adaptive Blue offers a competing product called SmartLinks. As the name implies, however, it’s limited to links. [Update: In the comments below, Wilson argues that the products are actually complementary, not competing. In fact, he says Adaptive Blue's chief executive introduced him to the Zemanta team.]

Zemanta is based in London and Slovenia. It previously raised $1.5 million in venture backing, but Union Square is its first US investor.

When you’re a new blogger trying to build traffic, you’re up against incredible odds. First, unless you’re writing about the intimate details of your personal life (and sometimes, even if you are) there’s a solid chance that other people are writing about the same thing. Second, they are probably doing a better job. The rote wisdom is that in order to build traffic, you need to build community, and one of most frequently cited ways to do this is to link to other blogs. Not only does citing other sources raise the likelihood of reciprocal linking, it is a good way to reflect your authority. Problem is, finding relevant material can be a serious pain in the ass.

Zemanta, a company based in London and Slovenia, thinks it has an answer: Blog and article suggestions, delivered in real time, as you write your blog. When it launched in March, Zemanta was a Firefox plug-in, which makes for a useful but limited distribution channel. Now, the company is moving its product to the server-side and is available as plug-ins for the WordPress, Moveable Type, and Live Journal platforms themselves. It has also significantly expanded the reach of its index, and now includes over 400 news sources and 1,000 major blogs. It can use an Amazon.com affiliate account to automatically create monetizeable links to books and CDs.

It has the potential to be a terrifically useful service. Every 300 words, Zemanta analyzes the content of your post and, in a sidebar, recommends relevant articles, blog posts, images from Flickr, and videos from YouTube. Clicking on a blog or article adds a link to it with the title, to the body of your piece. Images and videos get pasted in with a credit to the original source.

A few years ago, a company called Intellext released a similar product, called Watson 2.0. Unlike Zemanta, Watson 2.0 recommended content as you wrote a Word document and, despite impressive technology and a distribution deal with Microsoft’s desktop sidebar, never got off the ground. It probably didn’t help that it charged a subscription fee. Adaptive Blue’s SmartLinks deploy a somewhat similar capability, using semantic analysis to turn a blog’s links to wine, books, movies and various other products into rich data sources, suggesting multiple links from which to get more information.

By combining these capabilities into real-time content recommendations, Zemanta takes an original and possibly more useful approach than both of these services. The company has raised $1.5 million and hopes to make money using the affiliate model.