A few weeks ago, I installed the Zemanta module for Drupal on KnowProSE.com and haven't had much opportunity to play with it. Once configured, it does give you options - allowing you to link to images/video from a media gallery built as you write, as well as contextual links. The image to the right was added with one click (and it even showed up where I wanted to, perhaps by accident - perhaps not).
Overall, I'm beginning to see that this may be a useful tool. The last useful tool I found for blogging was tabbed browsing, but nowadays I'm drowning in tabs.
One of the hiccoughs I had was being in a writing mode and then finding out that I had to set up the module - but that is to be expected and it wasn't too painful. Still, I'm not sure that it's customized right for my own use; it seems so tailorable that it's likely that using Zemanta will be a continuous adjusting process. To speak to that process now would be too early as I have only adjusted it once. You can stick up to 800 sources to draw from - XML sources - into Zemanta as of this writing. That's impressive. How many do I have in there now? Oh, maybe 3.
It's fun to play with and see what can be done with it. It is rare that there's a tool that makes blogging easier and to say that Zemanta does this would be, for me, premature. I'll get back to it after about 50 blog posts and see how it really works out.
But then, the other beauty of Zemanta is that it's not invasive in the writing process. So far. :-)
