Docs research panel beats Zemanta gadget

Google Docs now has a research pane available while you're writing.   Basically this is a quick way to access google-search results.

To use it:

• Select a word
• Right-click the word
• Choose Research from the tools menu.

Or just select the word and hit the key-combo ( Ctrl+Alt+R on Windows or Cmd+Alt+R on Mac) if you think mice are evil time-wasters.

This is a far better than the Zemanta gadget that was offered to Blogger users back in 2010; research is done only on the words you want researched, not everything that you're writing. My experience was that the latter approach  slowed my machine down horribly, and mostly added no value because it just distracted me from what I wanted to write. Other people seemed to feel the same way, and for a while How to disable Zemanata in blogger was popular reading.

Personally, I'm not sure research-pane will be enough to convince me to write my posts in Docs and load them to Blogger from there: a lot of my research is about "how does Blogger handle this", which I can only find out my testing it.  But it will be a very handy tool for bloggers in some niches.

A couple of things to be aware of:  the pane  offers you imagees that you can "drag into your document", and it add footnotes saying where the image has come from. But the last time I loooked, documents loaded from Docs to Blogger didn't maintain footnotes. And even so, if the image is copyright, you can't get permission to use it in your blog just by linking to the source.

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Zemanta and your Blog: how to add and remove it

This article is about Zemanta and your blog:  what it is, how to add it, and how to delete it.

Overview

In June 2009, Google announced Zemanta - a tool for "blogging smarter", which had to be downloaded and installed into your browser.   More recently, they announced a closer integration between Google and Zemanata:  there is now a Google-hosted page where you you can choose to install Zemanta with pretty much a single click.

Zemanata is basically an assistant that sits inside Blogger while you're writing, and makes suggestions about related things (pictures, articles etc) that you might like to link to. It's fine in theory (although I'd prefer to control my own research process, and take responsibility myself for meeting copyright conditions), however I found real performance issues when I tried to use it - which is why I went looking for the removal instructions! Some people at Blogger clearly like it though, so it must have some advantages.

It's possible that there will be some more Zemanta integration coming:  eg options inside Blogger for enabling  and disabling it and setting the user-options/preferences.   But in the meantime the basic information about adding it to a blog, and removing it too, is presented here.


How to add Zemanta to your Blog

To turn Zemanta on for your blog:

• Log into Blogger with a Google account that has admin-rights on the blog which you want to use Zemanta with
  
  
• Click here to add the Zemanta gadget

• In the window that opens, choose the Blog from the drop-down list

• Click the orange "Add Zemanta" arrow.

Immediately after clicking the arrow, you are taken to the Post Editor with a new post for the blog that you selected.   There is an extra gadget showing on the right hand side of the editing window.  This gadget will be on the screen every time that you edit a post.

It's not currently available in the Page editor - but if you really want to use it while writing a Page, then just write the contents in a Post, save it as draft (ie don't publish), and use the HTML copy/paste approach described in Moving a Post from one Blog to Another.


How to remove Zemanta from your Blog

• Log into Blogger with a Google account that has admin-rights on the blog which you want to remove Zemanta from
• Open the Post Editor (eg by clicking New Post).

• In the top row of the Zemanta gadget, at the right hand side, there's a small down arrow.  Click the arrow and choose "Remove this gadget".

•  Click Ok.

Some people reported that removing it from Chrome was different:  they said that there you would not see the small drop-down arrow, but instead need to look in the browser's address bar and use the  Zemanta icon on the right hand side, which has an option to isable Zemanta for blogs.   However this clearly isn't the case now, because I just removed it from Chrome to make the pictures above.   It may be that these instructions apply if you have used some other method to install a toolbar:  in this case, you may need to go into the Control Panel and use Add/Remove Programs to remove it.

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Moving a Post from one Blog to Another

Copyright, Blogs and Bloggers

The difference between Pages and Posts

Zemanta - a tool for "blogging smarter" .

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