Yesterday’s post was created using a is a great add-on for Firefox, ScribeFire, which:

is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog.

However, in making a minor edit to the post, I noticed some code at the bottom:

<div class="zemanta-pixie"><img src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=[long tracking number here]" class="zemanta-pixie-img" /></div>

Where had that come from!? At no point had I consciously selected an option to add it there!

So a quick search later, I’d learnt that Zemanta is a service built into ScribeFire, providing additional related content to “enrich your blog posts”.

A comment on Brent’s blog explained how to deselect this “option” in the ScribeFire settings, under the ‘Publishing’ tab, look for ‘Automatically insert invisible tracking pixel for statistics gathering’.

Bad boys, ScribeFire and Zemanta, for not being open about things, and  enabling this option by default. At least provide a link to an explanation as to what “statistics” are being gathered, and for what means!