Early Saturday morning, I bussed it over to WordCamp, one of a series of events held all of the world for WordPress enthusiasts.

Here’s my video recap of the event – from the serious announcements to the inane observations. I took very detailed notes…so much so that I’m pretty sure people will be scared to sit next to me at future conferences. The things I do for you!

WordCamp 2009: On Crushes and Mergers from aziari on Vimeo.

Don’t know what WordPress is? Well, this site is run on it. So are millions of other blogs, and a good number of its users also use it as a CMS (content management system) for their sites. It has a handful of competitors, but WordPress is known for being very intuitive; at the event, creator Matt Mullenweg said his goal for WordPress was to make it “invisible” to users.

I was a virgin WordCamp attendee, but had a great time and it got me thinking about some changes I would like to make on this blog. I also listened to a handful of speakers including:

• Tim Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Work Week. Tim discussed the reasoning behind specific decisions he’s made in his blog design and content. One good tip Tim had was to study the “heat map” for your blog to see where people are clicking. For instance, he personally found that by changing a description from “categories” to “topics,” he received a substantial increase in click-throughs to the newly minted “topics” section of his blog.
• Matt Cutts of Google, who discussed building your blog for SEO. I was surprised to learn that dashes in URLs, not underscores, fare better when you’re optimizing your content for search.
• Matt Mullenweg (see above). Matt’s the same age as me, and I was really impressed by his composure, humulity and speaking abilities. He talked for nearly two hours during the conference – a “State of the Word” speech and a lengthy Q&A – and didn’t miss a beat.

I think my big takeaway was that I need to think more strategically about the features I integrate into my site. I also came away feeling really confident in my decision to change the topic of this blog to something I feel really passionate about. I’ve found my voice here.

Were you there? What were your big takeaways?

I wanted to let you know that I am in the process of changing the direction of this blog, as well as doing an entire site redesign.

This blog will no longer focus on general tech marketing and PR issues, and instead cover SF tech only. I will be working to highlight what’s going on here in tech – from events, to trends, to people – in both video and text form. This means fun and educational videos on events I go to, interviews with local entrepreneurs and tech figures, and coverage of weird phenomena that most of us have never heard of before (like Jelly).

Being brand new to this town, I think I’ll be able to provide you all with a really fresh perspective. We’ll discover it together.

I really want to mold this blog after something I would want to read. Hopefully other people will find it entertaining, too.

If you are here from meeting me at the Web2.0 Expo, please bookmark/add this blog to your RSS reader NOW. I guarantee you won’t be disappointed.

Image by Zemanta via CrunchBase

If Tumblr is a lazy 20-something’s blog platform of choice, Zemanta is its traditional but still oh-so-time-effective cousin.

I came across Zemanta today and thought it would be fun to write a blog post about it using only, well, it to provide me with a post’s tags, pictures and hyperlinks.

So here I am.

Launching in March 2008, Zemanta makes blogging a cinch, automatically recommending relevant hyperlinks, pictures, tags and related articles for your posts by analyzing the semantics of your text as you write.

I tested it here on my WordPress-based blog as well as on my Tumblr. Once downloaded, Zemanta showed up in the sidebar of both my blogging platforms (see photo) and I immediately put it to work.

Zemanta suggests photos (right), relevant articles (right), links (mid-page) and tags (bottom) that correlate to the semantics of blog posts. (Click-through to get a clearer picture.) Image by Tom Raftery via Flickr

What I really like about Zemanta is that all of the photos it suggests are either Creative Commons or approved by providers for free use. It takes the hassle of trying to find a photo that someone won’t hunt me down for using later on.

Respect thy photographer!

Also pretty neat: From a list, you can select a number of related articles to suggest to readers (see end of this post for an example). I don’t see this being a big hit for folks with personal blogs, but “professional” bloggers – absolutely.

Zemanta is available for free via extension on both Firefox and Internet Explorer for all major blogging platforms including WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger and MoveableType. So it’s not a platform like Tumblr per se, but uses the same “let’s make blogging as easy as possible” mentality.

Areas for improvement:

- Only judges the semantics of a post in its entirety. Zemanta does not suggest other content on the Web that correlates to specific phrases in a post – only posts on the whole. This is unfortunate. Bloggers commonly need to link to content that is outside the core topic of their posts but helps provide their readers with context. For example, if I was writing a post that briefly referenced the Social Media Press Release, wouldn’t it be great if Zemanta suggested that I add the link to SHIFT Communication’s press release about the world’s first ever SMPR?

- Offers limited multimedia suggestions. Zemanta does not suggest any type of multimedia beyond photos. Where are the recommendations for videos, music, podcasts, etc? For this blog entry, I wish Zemantra would have recommended to me that I add a video demo of the product. Under normal circumstances, I would have graciously added the demo for you but I’m sticking with my goal of only using this service!

Conclusion:

I tend to spend a lot of time (read: too much time) trying to find a picture that fits the look and feel of my blog as well as a post’s content. I also am bit of a slacker in linking to basic sources on the Web to provide context to my readers and also help this blog’s SEO. Zemanta is definitely helping me solve both these problems.

On a larger scale, I think Zemanta has huge market potential because it is…

a) solving a key pain point of bloggers and;

b) accomplishing this while requiring a very low learning curve and saving its users massive amounts of time. And really, couldn’t we all use a little more time to watch Mad Men in our lives?

Try it out for yourself. I think you’ll like it.

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