Zemanta makes a $3M round for blogging tool

Browser add-on automatically suggests bloggers supplemental related content as they write

Zemanta, a browser add-on that help bloggers add supplemental content to their posts, announced Thursday that it has raised $3 million--its biggest financing round to date--from previous backers Union Square Ventures and Eden Ventures. The Seedcamp 2007 winner has raised $6 million to date.

The new funding will be used to expand sales and increase blogging innovation.

Available only in English for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome, Zemanta is an add-on for browsers that only shows its face when you open up one of various supported blogging platforms and start writing. Once you’ve got a few lines of text, Zemanta will automatically start suggesting related content for your post, like images to embed, related articles to add below the post, links to include in the post, and suggested tags for the entire piece.

Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson has called Zemanta “adwords for content creators.”

Zemanta has 100,000 active users, a 10x jump from a year ago, according to co-founder and CEO Boštjan Špetič, and it makes one million recommendations per day.

The tool is available for many popular blogging and publishing platforms, including WordPress and Blogger, both of which Zemanta partnered with this past summer. Email clients--Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Outlook and Thunderbird--all play nice with Zemanta, and the company imagines that its service could be of use even beyond blogging and emailing.

“Our primary target on those platforms are bloggers that blog through email - like on Posterous,” CTO Andraz Tori told VatorNews. “But at the same time it shows the potential to go beyond blogging. In the future we envision the world where smart personal assistants will be able to improve our capabilities everywhere - from word processing, to email writing and creation of business presentations.”

Zemanta says all the content it recommends is copyright cleared--either clearly licensed under Creative Commons or usable based on fair use. Many of the images suggested, for example, are drawn from Wikimedia Commons. The service also sometimes suggests content from publishers that specifically paid to be submitted to the database. In these cases, Zemanta clearly labels the recommendation as “Promoted.”

Check out a demo of Zemanta:

Zemanta in 60 Seconds from zemanta on Vimeo.