Yesterday, I attended LaidOffCamp in San Francisco, which if accuracy is the goal, should have been called something closer to WorkCamp.

The point was to bring together both folks who’ve been laid off (God knows there’s a lot of them right now) as well as people who are untraditionally employed (think freelancers) in a loose “unconference” format where topics and presenters are decided on the spot. You’d expect some sort of screaming match to erupt in this intentional disorganization, but amazingly the whole shindig went off without a hitch.

24-year-old San Franciscan Chris Hutchins was inspired to create LaidOffCamp in January after being laid off himself. Since then, many more planned LaidOffCamps have sprung up around the nation and there has even been international interest, which speaks to the fragile state of the global economic system, if anything.

Throughout the day, I sat in on sessions on Startup Basics, Building a Resume 2.0, Def Leppard Networking (yes, you heard that right), and Freelancing Tools to name a few.

Lucky for you I documented the whole experience and also got the opportunity to sit down with Chris in between his New York Times and other media interviews. Here’s what you missed and what Chris had to say:

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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