Zemanta, From Mission to Product Part 1

Since the very first post of this blog, Zemanta, a plugin for richer content sharing in one’s writing, was implemented.  While it has been getting rave reviews from both trade and general press for the illustrative wealth it provides through semanticaly-related linksharing and images in blogs, most articles ignore the fact that the exact same plugin can be implemented in various kinds of webmail through a Firefox plugin.

I tend to agree with the rave reviews (and they are rave reviews), that Zemanta is one of the better blogging tools out there.  It provided all the neccessary links and images one would ever need for a blog, and hence builds a sort of outward link audience without much detailed effort.

However,  from looking at Zemanta’s mission, I am lost at why they would want the exact same product in an email.

Zemanta outlines their vision as:

Users expect rich content, rich with information revealed through links, images, illustrations, and references. When you think about it, the best Web-ready content is a carefully constructed mashup.

As users increasingly author content, forums, blogs and social networks are rapidly becoming their favorite playground for individual expression. It’s there that they are telling their stories and sharing new information, weaving in rich content elements from across the web.At Zemanta, we want to help you tell your stories with more insight, more impact, and more smarts than ever before—to attract and build your readership.

This mission is clearly is an outwardly directed mission.  Zemanta wants to reshape the way we think blogs should be like that, by making them more insightful and smarter to read, through giving you better links.  In fact, I could see people, not knowing what a Zemanta product was, from reading this statement, thinking that Zemanta makes products to enrich our outwardly directed conversations that we have on the Internet, such as blogs, forums, charooms, and maybe lists.

The email product, fits awkwardly when it comes to those conversations.  While clearly it fits into Zemantas’s vision to help someone tell a better story and build better readership- what kind of readership and relationship are we talking about?  Many emails are not more than one line long, let along a paragraph.  Many long emails are akin to personal letters, or have complex relationships to the business world.  Generally, if someone is emailing, they have some sort of inquiry towards a more personaly relationship, or already have established a personal relationship, except in the case of mailing to a list (one to many). As a result,compared to any other written medium on the Internet, they are marked with more of the author’s internally facing personality .  This is also a medium famous for avoiding images as a general rule- though there are execptions amoung close friends and family sharing personal keepsake photos.

Copying one-to-one the blogging tool was a poor choice.  It doesn’t reflect the wide, if not wider uses of email directly.  Email has a high level of privacy and direction associated to it.  As a result, while I think Zemanata is on the right track for providing an engaging tool of semanically tagged links and images, Zemanta for email needs to clarify how it wants to make for more engaging readership inside a much more personal medium.

I would pay (probably a small fee, as of this writing, I’m a poor student) for a product that does keep track of my semantically tagged bookmarks  for placement in emails for business and personal use (as well as my images).  At the same time, I recognize that the power Zemanta is that it brings other content to the table, as proven by the early success of its blog plugin.  It feels intensely more awkward to pepper others’ thoughts inside ones own private words, especially if those words are short. One of the ways that copying plugin to plugin (or nearly so) in the case of the email plugin sells itself short is by not providing a link between the personal and the outside through the lack of reconition of how my personal data that I want to share with friends, but perhaps not so detailed on a blog- links with what Zemanta has access to.  The UI, however, leaves that unclear.

Richness of content in email comes from knowing how to better delve back into the privacy of ones thoughts.  Zemanta leaves itself in a difficult potion- how does it best explain for email that it is trying to do that, since its UI leaves it unsure of itself for email.  Adjusting some of its surface and turning it into a “Just for email” tool would help navigate those spaces much more efficiently.  Asking questions about how people email in relation to thier mission (what counts as rich content in the average email sent?) would be very useful in this redesign.  Being bold (which they were about Zemanta for blogs), would lead to a superior product.

Part 2- the email ecosystem

Related articles by Zemanta

• Tutorial: Getting Started with Zemanta (zemanta.com)
• New Zemanta WordPress plugin and 2.8 compatibility (zemanta.com)
• Zemanta. Bibliography for your Blog (emptyofwhat.com)