CT Biz Blogs

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

Well, it was quite a good conference. As I mentioned in Tuesday’s post, I did some “live blogging,” which means I typed furiously as speakers talked, and hit “publish” when they were done.

I did those on the Creative Concepts blog, instead of here, however.

But here are the links for those posts, for your perusing convenience. Remember, these are my notes of the talks, so take that into account. These are summaries, not transcripts.

• David Pogue at Business Smart Tools Conference
• Mike Dunn on Podcasting
• Matt Kain on Search Engine Marketing
• David Parmet on Blogging

I must say I was a bit disappointed in David Pogue’s keynote speech. Not in the presentation, because he’s a great speaker, but in the content. It seemed to me that he spent too much time on the perceived negatives of blogs. I say perceived, because I don’t think he gave the full picture, just his understanding of the blogosphere. His examples were all news or political blogs, such as Gawker, Wonkette, and the like. I don’t know if he’s looked much at business blogs, or even topical blogs, such as Lifehacker, a blog about technology and productivity.

David Parmet asked him about other blogs, such as TechCrunch. Pogue hadn’t heard of it. Now, if you’re just a regular person, that’s understandable. But if you’re a techie, or a technology writer, that’s not a good sign.

You can read a summary of what he said in the on-line article written by Richard Lee, of the Stamford Advocate: Blogs, podcasts: Are they friends or foes?

“If it bleeds, it leads,” I guess.

Update 6/17/07 : Check out the comments for David Pogue’s reply and Ann Marie Brucia’s view of what she got out of the conference. Did I over-react to the negatives? I was concerned that his talk might scare people off, but Ann Marie wasn’t, so maybe I’m wrong?

Well, I made it to Stamford, CT, for the Business Smart Tools conference. It’s about to start. I made the rounds of the exhibitors, before the rush. There’s some cool technology out there. I talked to folks at:

• Vivapop (interactive web and voice accessible calendar)
• Conversagent (automated customer service agents)
• MarketWire (search engine optimization through press releases)
• Dial-a-Note powered by CiviCom (hands-free notepad)
• 24/7Real Media USA

I’m sure I’ll find out more as the conference progresses. I’m looking forward to the speaking part of the program, which will start at 2 PM.

I saw part of David Parmet’s presentation on blogging as he tested the projector, and it looks great.

He’s also started a Business Smart Tools Flickr photo set.