Zemanta Levels Blogger Playing Field

For those of us writers who find ourselves seeking new content to relate to what we write, it was a huge breath of fresh air when Zemanta was released. Zemanta not only offered us links, but it offered up keywords we might want to highlight, along with images the engine though we should include in our post. Zemanta was unlike anything we’d ever seen in terms of its wide use and availability across browsers and blogging sites.

More recently Zemanta has made efforts to level the playing field, finally succeeding in opening up it’s engine to include not just articles of recommendation from relevant sites, but to also include recommendations from other bloggers who, perhaps have not hit their stardom online. This gives an great opportunity for a smaller blog site to be listed as related content and drive traffic to the site while at the same time providing a level of authority they would have otherwise not been able to have.

Naturally the fear of diluting the related content option has been expressed, but by not allowing the larger community of bloggers to be listed also kept users from seeing some of the quality content produced on smaller sites, so in my eyes the door swung both ways.  TechCrunch did make a good point in stating that the service will at least ensure that users will keep returning, and in that perhaps lies the real gem of keeping the community together.