Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson has given European startup Zemanta another $750,000, raising the young company's total to $2.25 million in early funding. What does Zemanta do? They've created a set of browser and blogging software plugins that automagically suggest and quickly adds "relevant" links to your blog posts, which Wilson has described as like "AdWords for content creators." My prediction?

It'll be catnip to the bloggers featured on Techmeme, an automated news aggregator which has attracted an obsessive following among tech bloggers, if not actual traffic worth speaking of. Instead of seeking actual pageviews, Techmeme gamers try to collect some ineffable sense of self-importance. And so they'll inevitably start linking to Zemanta-suggested stories out of laziness. Even reporter Anthony Ha admits, "Linking and adding other media can feel like time-consuming distractions when I’m writing VentureBeat posts."

With all the TechMeme pile-on posts drawing from the same pool of Zemanta-planted background links, the feedback loop in tech blogosphere groupthink will be turned up to 11. Honestly, with an algorithm finding your story leads, an algorithm doing your research, and an alogrithm choosing the relevant ads, why do we need human tech bloggers at all?

Contact information for this author is not available.