Tagaroo vs Zemanta

Tag and image suggestions

When Zemanta first came out, I fell instantly in love.  I had been blogging about a year and I found it really, really useful to have it suggest links and images as I wrote.  It even helpfully suggested posts of my own to list as “similar posts”.

Why I fell out of love with Zemanta

But Zemanta became ‘luggable’.  It did strange things while I was writing, scribbling my posts.  It was immensely difficult to turn off when it played up.  It also lost its tremendously helpful Community Manager.  Sadly, I unsubscribed and, as is the wont of the net, forgot about it.

Is Tagaroo a good alternative?

Today, I found a similar service, Tagaroo.

Tagaroo is downloaded as WordPress plugin where Zemanta is a Firefox extension.  This is the first time I am using it.  It is slowing down my typing.  So check luggable.

Tagaroo sits below the post, rather than next to it.  And it has moved my tag box below the post.  Let’s see what it has done. It has suggested Zemanta as a tag but not Tagaroo(!) or semantic web or anything intelligent.

It has listed 2000+ images which tend to be ‘literal’ rather conceptual.

I picked one and it took me a while to figure out how to insert it.  The choices were staring me in the face.  There are four choices of size but they are all positioned on the left. I suppose that could be adjusted with a bit of editing.  It also inserts far less code into a post than Zemanta – one of the reasons that Zemanta played up as it got tangled up during edits.

Evaluation of Tagaroo

No. I am not totally convinced.  I’ll use it once or twice again.  But so far, I’d say it is quicker to check out Flickr myself.

P.S.  And one more thing.  Tagaroo highlights any sentence containing a tag.  Not very useful for blogging but fantastic if you were doing research and wanted to skim a document.