My daily RSS feed reading includes a number of news services targeted at WordPress developers. This morning I found a story about a new plugin called Zemanta which claims to help you find stories to write about by comparing your content with what it finds elsewhere on the Internet. This was way too science-fictional to pass up, so I have installed it.

Now, the thing about Zemanta is that it works off what you write. It wasn’t until I got to the end of the above paragraph that it provided suggestions for topics to talk about here. However, it can work off old posts. I went into the SF Awards Watch blog and looked at my most recent post about the Locus awards. How did Zemanta do? Bingo!

Obviously not everything was good, but the #1 photo it found was a picture of the 2005 Hugo Award trophy (complete with plug for the very wonderful Deb Kosiba), and the #1 story was a post on Boing!Boing! telling me that my good friend Guidolon the Giant Space Chicken is going to star in his very own full length feature film. I’m impressed (and very happy for Guidolon who is a very nice Giant Space Chicken and deserves more respect than Hollywood has given him to date).

Meanwhile Zemanta is telling me that I ought to be writing more posts about Zemanta and linking to other stories about the software. No surprise there.

Anyway, Zemanta works with Blogger and TypePad as well, so many of you will be able to try it out. Have fun.