Image via Wikipedia

I love Zemanta.  It’s my favorite blogging plug-in, and I am so hooked on it that I even declared I’d rather pay for it than lose it.  Fortunately that may not be necessary for a while: at the recent Defrag Conference I met co-Founder & CTO Andraz Tori, who told me about several monetization concepts next year, and none involve directly charging users.

But forget monetization, let’s focus on why I really like it: it’s amazingly good in recommending contextually relevant related posts. I do like listing related sources, whether they agree with my point or not, and Zemanta is great time-saver in the process.  That is for textual context … I haven’t been too happy with the “relevant” image recommendations.

Andraz explained the problem was that I often write about abstract business concepts: if this was a travel, cooking, shopping, art..etc related blog, they’d get far better matches from Flickr, Wikipedia, Getty Images and a number of related sources. 
That said, they had one amazingly intelligent hit: while in my post titled Turn the Doom-talk into Constructive Business Model Ideas I did not once use the words train or train-wreck,  Zemanta correctly inserted a photo of an actual train-wreck. Does Zemanta understand abstract concepts, metaphors?  (As Andraz later explained, my post was likely associated with others who used the term train-wreck to describe the shape of the economy)

Well, let’s see what the defaults are .. fire up the editor, and voila!

Hm… I must admit it is indeed an inspiring photo… just not sure I want to blog about it here.  It would change the nature of CloudAve forever.