CT Biz Blogs

In my research on podcasting, I stumbled upon this resource: GigaVox’s Podcast Academy. It’s a treasure-trove of audio from various conferences, all to do with Podcasting.

One podcast that looks great, but I haven’t listened to yet, is Doug Kaye’s - Podcast Concepts & Making Them Happen.

GigaVox also is releasing audio from the Corporate Podcast Summit, held in June, 2006. Over the coming weeks, they will be putting all the audio from that summit online. Right now they have two online:

• Podcasting 101

• Podcasting to Build a Marketing Message

I’ve listened to Damien Stolarz’s Podcasting 101 — it’s a whirl-wind tour through the buzzwords and basic concepts. If you’re really new to all this blogging and podcasting stuff I’d recommend listening to it while looking at the Podcasting 101 PDF that’s also available.

As I said, they’re going to be releasing the audio over the next few weeks, and you can subscribe to the RSS feed for that. If you’re in a hurry and you want it all now, you can plunk down US $24.99 and get it all now, via download. That’s what I did, although at the rate I’m listening, they’ll probably all be online for free by the time I’m finished.

It looks like there’s a lot of good content on the Podcast Academy site: how-to’s on recording phone conversations, advanced editing, and the like.

Check it out!

Technorati : podcasting

We have one lucky winner of Arianna Huffington’s book, On Becoming Fearless: Phil Newton.

He writes about the fear of showing your personality on your blog and why letting go of that fear has helped him.

You can read his comment here, and check out his blogs, to see how he does it:

• Phil Newton.net
• Sodaware.net

Thanks, Phil!

I still have three more books to give away, so don’t be shy! I’m going to extend the contest for the rest of the week, and open it up to non-bloggers as well. If you’re a non-blogger, I’d love to know what some of your concerns about blogging are.

Here’s what to do:

1. Read the post on winning a copy of the book.

2. Click the comments link on that post.

3. Leave your comment about your blogging fear — you can leave an anonymous post, too.

If you don’t want to leave a comment, email me: ctbizblogs (at) gmail.com, with the subject header: On Becoming Fearless.

You’ve got until Friday, September 1, midnight Eastern Daylight Time, but this contest is open to anyone, anywhere in the world. (But if you win, expect your book to arrive by the cheapest possible way I can find!)
One small comment could reap big rewards!

In a panel at BlogHer 06, Arianna Huffington, of the Huffington Post, offered to send people at the conference a free copy of her book, On Becoming Fearless, if they emailed her. So I did. I just got it yesterday, so I can’t review it yet.

The offer’s still up at her virtual book tour but it might be over by now. (You can also read a free excerpt from the book.)

But if it’s too late, don’t worry - Kelly Leonard, of Hachette Book Group USA, gave me copies to give away!

I’d like to try a contest for the remaining four copies I have. Here’s the deal: there are many fears about blogging - some real, some imagined. But we blog anyway.

I want to hear from other bloggers about one fear that they had about blogging and why they didn’t let it stop them. To have a chance to win a free book (I’ll even pay postage myself) leave a comment on this post about a blogging fear, and why that didn’t stop you.

The four comments that I think are the best will win a copy of the book.

You don’t have to leave your real name, if you don’t want to, but do leave a real email address (that doesn’t get published and will be kept confidential) so that I can notify you if you win.

The contest will run until midnight, Sunday, August 27th. Eligibility will be determined by the time stamp on the blog comment. This blog is running on US Eastern Daylight Time (same time zone as New York City). That’s currently Greenwich Mean Time - 4 hours. Here’s a link to the World Time Clock’s current time in NYC, if you’re interested.

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=179

So what do you think? What is one of your fears about blogging? And why did you decide to blog anyway?

As a bonus, here’s one of mine: that no one will enter the contest! It’ll just look so pathetic. But I did it anyway because I want to see what happens. So step up, say your piece, and maybe win one of our fabulous prizes.

Technorati: virtual book tours blogher06

There’s still plenty of things happening at the BlogHer 2006 site. The audio recordings from the conference are starting to come online.

You can listen to the BlogHer Day One and Day Two Keynotes here.

And here’s the audio from Day Two, session one (three sessions).

Also, ListenShare, the folks who so ably took care of the audio for the conference have a blog with more BlogHer 06 audio interviews with several of the speakers.

And, of course, the BEST way to keep up with the audio is via the ‘06 Podcasts RSS feed.

Technorati : BlogHer06

A lot of bloggers are concerned about stats. When I first looked at my stats, I was amazed at how much information it looked like there was about the numbers of people who accessed this blog and clicked around. (Well, first I was depressed at the low numbers, but then I was amazed at the amount of items that supposedly can be tracked.)

But note that I said “access” and not “read,” because that’s another thing entirely. As blogging sage Dave Winer has noted,

It would be interesting to do a study to see if people can tell you what a blog post said some short interval after reading it. Something like the SAT, for blog readers. I bet the numbers would be astonishingly small.

I think that’s especially true of the hard-core blog readers, those who scan over 100 blogs a day — and that’s a large number of people, in the blogosphere. (Mea culpa!)

As Dave points out, stat numbers don’t equal readers. But it’s also true that stat numbers don’t even equal the real number of people looking at your site. The problem with stats is that you have to do some thinking to really understand them. The numbers, by themselves, don’t mean much.

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Another sign that blogging is continuing to gather steam — the increasing number of conferences about it.(Such as Business Smart Tools, which is actually about more than blogging, and which is gonna be even bigger next year!)

I’m going to two in the near future — one on Podcasting, and one on Blog Biz.

Podcamp Boston looks like fun. It’s free, which is a big plus. Although I have absolutely no plans to podcast myself, several clients are interested. One thing I want to learn about is podcast metrics — ways to get some stats on downloads and feeds. Podcamp seems like it will have a whole range of topics to pick from — check out their Podcamp Wiki for more info.

Blog Business Summit is going on October 25-27. (Yet another West Coast conference — oh well.) This one looks more business-centric than BlogHer06. Not to dis BlogHer — it was fantastic, and some day I’ll actually organize my notes and thoughts and post them here.

Last year’s conference was held in San Francisco, and looks to have been very well-regarded.

And as a bonus link, here’s a great post from Dave Taylor on The Critical Business Value of Attending Conferences.

‘Nuf said.

Technorati : BlogHer06

How time flies, as they say. CTBizBlogs is one year old today, August 13th.

When I started, I’d already been blogging sporadically in other blogs, hosted by Blogger, for over a year. But I was ready for more control and more options. So I plunked down some money, bought a few domains, got a web hosting provider and started posting.

I picked WordPress for 2 reasons — it was free, and my hosting provider, Dreamhost, offered a one-click installation.

Since then I’ve learned a lot about WordPress, web hosting, and blog writing.

When I started, I was full of pent-up posts, so it was pretty easy to pick any topic on blogging and just start typing. Sometimes that resulted in a good post, sometimes not.

Also when I started, my day job was in the doldrums, and I had not much outlet for my creative energy. Be careful what you wish for there — now I have more ideas and projects than time. That’s why I’m still using the older version of the Journalized template.

Here are a few of the things I’ve learned over the last year:

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At BlogHer’06, the blogging conference held in San Jose last week, GM was there, outside the conference center, with Saturn cars to test drive (and free goodies). So I took a spin around the block in the Saturn Vue hybrid. This is an SUV (but not a huge one like the Lincoln Navigator) with hybrid power.

These folks from GM were pretty smart — first, they went where their audience was. Never mind that we were at a blogging conference, this was also a conference about women and these cars were pretty appealing.

Next they used the power of informal, viral marketing to record people’s feedback after the drives, with a digital camera.

They quickly made small movies and a week later, started putting them up on GM blogs and on YouTube.

Then they made sure that the bloggers who were filmed — what the heck do you call it now? No film was used and no videotape, either — got notice of the video via trackbacks.

That’s how I found out that I’m now a speck of DNA in a viral marketing campaign for the Saturn Vue Hybrid.

And you don’t need to be GM to do it, folks.

All you need is a decent digital camera, a blog, and YouTube, Google Video, or other video hosting sites.

And if you have a WordPress.org blog, you can make use of an excellent WordPress plugin, WP-FLV, to put a flash video up on your own blog. This is good for folks who want more control over how the video is displayed.

Read Michael Pollock’s how to set up video in a WordPress blog for details.

Ok, I lied.

Blogging IS new to a lot of people, but the thing it’s for — communication — that’s not new.

And if you’re hesitating trying out blogging because you’re nervous about this new thing, don’t be. Many of the same rules apply for blogging as do for any form of communication. They’re just ramped up a notch by the “enabling” blogging software.

Today I offer you two examples of communication, one bad and one good.

The bad example is actually a non-blogging one, but the mistakes here can also be made via blogging, so take heed.

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When I flew in to San Jose, California for the BlogHer convention, I got a chance to meet Molly Lavik.

By some amazing coincidence, Molly Lavik, founder and CEO of Mentorography was in town at another conference, which was just ending — something about Entrepreneurial stuff.

I met Molly online earlier this year, and she hired me to help in the initial setting up of her blog. We had some great conversations and it was fascinating to me to hear her plans and ideas. She used a web designer to create a WordPress site that does not look like a blog at all.

Molly is a professor at Pepperdine and has co-written a book about start-ups and entrepreneurship,Entrepreneurial Marketing: Real Stories and Survival Strategies. She’s also written a new one, not yet published, called Startup Time. (Unfortunately, to see the preview, you need to register at the online bookstore where it’s featured).

At Mentorography she’s set up a site where she’s been posting audio interviews with various entrepreneurs. The tag line of the blog reads ” Listen to and comment on digital diaries of lessons learned from socially-responsible entrepreneurs.” Once you register (free) you can hear the audios, and leave comments. I listened to a few and plan on hearing more.

Molly and I got a chance to actually meet at San Jose airport, after I landed and before she flew out. It turned out that our airlines, Southwest and American, were both at the same terminal. (Not that I knew that until I walked out of the terminal and down the block to find transportation to the American terminal. I was directed to a building across the street. This turned out to be connected via a section that crossed over the street, to the building I had just left!)

We had a great chat, and she recorded me for Mentorography. I do get to hear it first and can veto it, so don’t get your hopes up, o my many fans.

If you’re interested in entrepreneurship, check out Molly’s site.