Six Apart, the Movable Type/Typepad parent company, has announced a “Journalist Bailout Program” for recovering journalists or bloggers looking for a fresh start. Its slogan: “Because your Tumblr and Tweets, while clever, will not pay the bills.”

The program offers laid off writers a free TypePad Pro blog account (the pay service typically used by professional blogs), along with a free enrollment in the Six Apart Media advertising program (in which the user keeps revenue from the display ads) and free promotions on Blogs.com. Six Apart will also provide advice on driving traffic and other online publishing-related concerns.

“While we can’t promise it’s going to replace having a full-time writing gig, it gets you up and running with your own site that you can start to benefit from,” the company says. “We’re offering a platform to publish your work and profit from it. A platform that gives you complete control, with no dependence on the whims of a publisher, and no interference from an outside editor.”

Six Apart is offering the package — which it says is a $150 annual value — free to any journalist. It does require you to submit a link to a recent publication with a valid newspaper, magazine, or broadcast journalism organization to qualify. The company says it’s already gotten a “flood of submissions” and is planning to leave the offer open only for a limited amount of time. No specific end date, though, is provided.

You can learn more about the program and how to sign up here.

Related posts:

1. Now We’re Talking: Laid Off Journalists Start News Sites
2. Journalist whines while Huffington Posts tries to help
3. North Korea journalist case highlights American hypocrisy

Zemanta is a Slovenian blogging tool that automatically suggests contextual photos and links for any post.

Webware describes Zemanta as “a brilliant product for lazy or otherwise time-focused bloggers” and it’s a fair description. The tool is offered either as a plugin for hosted blogs (WordPress and MovableType), as a browser extension (IE and Firefox) or with hosted platforms including WordPress, Blogger, TypePad and LiveJournal.

Image by Roebot via Flickr.

The video above walks through what it looks like on a Blogger blog, on a WordPress hosted blog I’m currently seeing a Zemanta box directly below the publish options on the right hand side. The plugin updates every 300 characters automatically, offering a gallery of context and legal pictures I can use on the this post. Below is a list of contextual articles I can place in the post at any time. Below the WordPress post box is a box labeled “links” with suggestions for links that can be inserted into the post base on words in it, for example with this post it’s showing Firefox, LiveJournal, WordPress, Zemanta and others. The tag box also gets contextual suggestions as well.

I’ve only just installed it, and have really got to give it a more serious workout, but my first thoughts: this is a really useful tool and I can see myself using it and even recommending it to others. Not having to dig around for pics (well at least less often), less stuffing around with link insertion, tag reminders, even related articles. My only two negatives: what are they getting out of this (where’s the catch) and secondly, it insists on inserting a Zemanta button at the bottom of every post every time you hit a button, so if you’re half way through you’ve then got to deal with code stuck directly after your last word. It’s easy to delete it prior to posting and ultimately it’s only a small annoyance.

Example of a contextual link below, the Zemanta button that the tool auto inserted, and the laptop picture above from their gallery suggestions.

Related posts:

1. Zemanta adds four platforms, tweaks Reblog service
2. New Word On Firefox 3 Add-Ons
3. Outbrain gets a revenue model, and it’s rather clever

Michael at TechCrunch notes that TypePad AntiSpam takes a multi-headed heuristic approach to detecting and blocking comment spam on blogs and in his testing was superior to Akismet. Mollom is another new service in this space (I covered it for TechCrunch in April).

The two great features about TypePad AntiSpam: it’s open source and it has a killer price: free, unlike the closed source and pay for serious use Akismet. It’s also available for WordPress blogs as well as those powered by SixApart products, immediately delivering SixApart a huge potential market.

It’s great to see competition in antispam products, and it has been long overdue, but times are changing. We are seeing a move away from local comment hosting to services such as Disqus, Sezwho and others, outsourcing spam management along with comment management to other companies. The numbers on paper may be small so far, but the trend away from local comment management is on, and even sites such as Venturebeat are now using Disqus. Notably both Sezwho and Disqus are using Akismet for spam filtering.

So where does this leave Akismet and TypePad AntiSpam? There will always be a corporate need for antispam tools, and ultimately this is where the potential profits in service provision rest. Some bloggers will remain using local commenting systems and they’ll need services like these, however expect those numbers to become a minority within 2-3 years.

Related posts:

1. Disqus responds to critics: local comment hosting
2. JS-Kit acquires HaloScan, but why trash talk Disqus?
3. Intense Debate Ups Comment Ante With FriendFeed Support