Windows Live Writer users: We're going to miss you Zemanta…

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I don't know when Zemanta stopped officially supporting Windows Live Writer as a plug-in, but I was pretty disappointed the other day when I received an e-mail from their support forum indicating that Zemanta had stopped supporting Windows Live Writer and moved on to strictly web-based blogging services.

I know that my interactions with Zemanta have been up and down because Zemanta would have problems with their plug-in and not fix it, and I'm sure that comes down to issues of resources vs. how much money you're willing to spend to keep alive plug-in that you feel that most people don't use.

Windows Live Writer continues to be the most popular off-line blogging editor on the Internet. Surprisingly, Microsoft hasn't hit on their hands with Windows Live Writer. It's an application that bloggers love, it's an application that's free for Microsoft, but it's also an application that's being completely underappreciated. I'm sure the Zemanta is taking the under-appreciation part to heart in dropping support for the Zemanta plug-in for Windows Live Writer.

I went to Zemanta's website today to try to find a link to download at least the latest version, the last version, of Zemanta does plug-in for Windows Live Writer; to download it one more time, but as with most applications that have been sunset links to the plug-in have been removed from the website...

Fortunate for me, I keep old download for reference…

 

Zemanta Plug-in for Windows Live Writer  
DOWNLOAD IT

Although I am providing the link to be able to download this plug-in, I'm sure that Zemanta is going to continue its position of not supporting; so by downloading the plug-in here, don't expect Zemanta to provide ongoing support for it.

I am a little bit saddened that Zemanta has chosen not to continue supporting their plug-in, because I felt that Zemanta's plug-in for Windows Live Writer was very important. I felt that the plug-in that it offered and very powerful benefits to those users who are using it. Zemanta's argument for not supporting the plug-in, from many months ago, was that the plug-in wasn't used enough by the Windows Live Writer audience; this could have been blamed on how Zemanta marketed the plug-in in the first place. Or this could have been blamed on Microsoft, poor execution and presenting of available plug-ins for Windows Live Writer in the first place.

Even so, the plug-in offered off-line bloggers the ability to add images, find related articles and insert relative links into the articles as the authors were composing.

I find this discontinuation, of this plug-in, for Windows Live Writer is the most substantial because this plug-in provided powerful resources, images, related articles and internal linking publications; things that blog authors really need to be able to do— this plug-in made that process really easy. And while Microsoft has provided a great application for off-line blogging, they have not nurtured the application. And while Microsoft continues to neglect Windows Live Writer, and kill the 'Windows live' name, Zemanta recognizes still that users need access to this type of information in these resources.

sbks5hm5

Zemanta is continuing to offer their services on various blogging platforms, but only as a web service. In order to use Zemanta's services at this point, you'll have to compose your blogs off-line, open the blog with your browser and then process the article post publication.

I believe I will miss this plug-in the most of all my plug-ins I use. Zemanta, sorry to see you go…

 

Thank you,
Larry Henry Jr.
LEHSYS.com

1 comment:

  1. Hi Larry,

    Andraz from Zemanta here.

    One of the challenges with LiveWriter we have is that we can't get a decent number of users on the platform. We tried to get some kind of promotion from MS to enlarge our user base on LiveWriter, but couldn't. So numbers of active users are going down every week while other platforms are growing.

    We are present in their Live Gallery, but that wasn't getting any love from MS and number of new installations was minimal.

    Therefore we decided to concentrate our support to platforms where we have stronger support from the vendor - Wordpress, Typepad and alike.

    Also, we're not really discontinuing it, we just aren't providing further updates at this time. I hope it will be at least partly useful for you.

    I hope we can still get back to LiveWriter and support it some time in the future.


    bye
    andraz

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