When editors and publishers discuss ways to improve editorial, too often the solutions are complicated and take weeks. Sometimes, all we need is a quick shot in the arm.
Thankfully there are lots of plugins, scripts and APIs available to help give your content more depth. And best of all: most take less than an hour to install and cost nothing.
Here are our favorite quick ways to enhance your editorial process:
ZEMANTA
Cost: Free
When publishing on the Web, writing the blog post is only half the battle. After that last sentence is typed, a writer then has to begin the painstaking process of searching for relevent links and pictures.
Zemanta expedites the post-writing process by automatically searching Flickr for relevent images, relevent in-text links, recommended tags and recommended articles on the Web. Given your URL, Zemanta can even search only your content for relevent links.
"We're trying to open up the service as much as possible," says founder Boštjan Špetič. The company plans on adding features that allow writers to control where the pictures and recommended stories originate from. Špetič said that users will soon be able to give Zemanta a list of feeds to cull from.
The service is available as a browser extension and as a plugin to the popular blogging platforms. However, the company said it will be setting its sites higher in the months to come.
"We know that this type of the tool is the future of online publishers," says Špetič. "The big media guys will start implementing them sooner or later."
Open Calais
Cost: Free to $2,000 per month.
Open Calais (pronounced "KA - LAY") is Thompson Reuters auto-tagging software that automatically scans content and tags your content work with the semantic web.
However, not only does the software tag content it will automatically categories the tags (see it in action in or sidebar under "Related Categories"). The tags are then linked to your other content about that subject, giving you some real SEO juice for your content.
For bloggers, the service is available as a plugin. Larger publishers, however, can enlist developers to take advantage of the service's API. Publications that plan on tagging more than 50,000 items a day will have to upgrade to the service's professional version.
Insight
Cost: Free.
Insight is an experimental new commenting system that allows readers to comment inline instead of after the story. For example, on a Huffington Post story about the healthcare bill, readers can discuss certain phrases in the story.
A small "In" icon appears next to text that has a comment and on mouseover the discussion expands. We'll admit that the service is still a bit cumbersome, but it's in a beta, and certainly has potential for sites with meaty content, like politics or legal publications.
To install, just register on Insight's homepage and paste in the few lines of Javascript.
Publish2
Cost: Free.
As curation continues to become a priority for online publications, many editors have taken to publishing a round-up post or a "links we love" section of the sidebar.
Publish2 helps save links and then allows users to repurpose them as a digest post, a widget or an RSS feed. The links have loads of metadata and can be filtered and modified.
However, perhaps most importantly, publish2 is built around collaboration, so an entire newsroom can contribute to a single stream of links. Earlier this year during the Copenhagen climate meetings, for example, multiple newsrooms collaborated to provide readers with a "collaborative newswire" surrounding the conference.
APTURE
Cost: Free.
While Open Calais and Zemanta focus primarily on tagging text, Apture aims to insert relevent multimedia in your content.
Through a plugin available on most of the major blogging CMS platforms, Apture allows users to highlight a phrase in their copy and Apture will automatically scour the web for video, audio, slideshows and other multimedia content that matches the highlighted phrase. User can insert an entire video or just clip just the relevant parts.
Apture does work with non-blogging CMS platforms like Clickability. However, you'll need to contact them.
What are your favorite tools to for better content? Let us know in the comments below.
