I was reading TechCrunch this morning as I do every morning and noticed a post about a new Firefox add-on called “Zemanta“. It turns out that this is actually a useful add-on, in fact so useful that I’ve decided to write a short blurb about it, partly because it’s interesting and partly because I wanted to test it (some of this post has been “Zemantafied”). It’s simple to install and works automatically with Firefox, TypePad, WordPress and Blogger each platform will be provided with a new toolbar after installation.

Just for the record I use WordPress to write this blog so my experience is only on one of the three supported platforms.  Upon creating a new post I was presented with a new Zemanta toolbar in the right column of my WordPress installation. The Zemanta toolbar contains two core components. There is a photo gallery to support your content and an articles list which gets auto created every 300 characters to reflect what your writing about.

The more you type the more suggestions Zemanta will have for links and images.  It attempts to “sematify” your content.  It seems to pull it’s content from wikipedia as you’ll see if you click on some of my links like Blogger, installation, TypePad, and WordPress.  You’ll still need to specify specific links to articles as I have with the link to the TechCrunch post.

While there is still a lot of work to do with this add-on it’s certainly handy and I suspect will improve 10 fold as time goes on.  I almost forgot you’ll also get a nice little Zemified button at the bottom right corner of your post!