Zemanta on Movable Type

Zemanta notified me to tell me that Zemanta's Firefox plugin now works with Movable Type. Woohoo! They said, "Just wanted to drop a quick note that we released a new version of Zemanta today that adds support for MT 4.1. Only through extension for now, but plugin will follow in a few weeks." I was a little peeved that their initial launch included Wordpress and not MT so I actually posted a thread to their forums asking when Zemanta would be available for Movable Type. They promised me support for MT was coming and indeed it has!

What Zemanta does is simply monitor the text in your blog draft and then go out on the web (connecting to Zemanta's web servers) to find relevant/related images, articles, and tags. I guess you could call Zemanta a blogger's "cheat sheet" for quickly finding relevant articles, images and tags. Until now, Zemanta only worked on Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Typepad.com, and self-hosted Wordpresses from version 2.0 onwards. But as of today, Movable Type 4.1+ is supported. Speaking of Movable Type, the latest version of Movable Type v4.15 was expected to be released 2 days ago (May 19th), but was delayed until May 28th. Bummer. Can't wait to upgrade, since MT 4.15 has some cool new features and performance enhancements. But I digress...

Below is a screenshot of me testing it on Movable Type 4.1 while pretending to blog about Michael Jordan. Click for full-image where you will see the Zemanta Firefox plugin seamlessly integrating into the Movable Type interface. From the Gallery I was able to hover my mouse over an image to see a description, copyright info, source, etc. and then simply click on the image to have it inserted into my blog post. Same thing with related articles and related tags. As to whether I'll actually use Zemanta on a regular basis remains to be seen. I prefer uploading my own images to the blog server rather than "hot linking" to outside images. But I'm going to try it for awhile and see how it goes.