CT Biz Blogs

Short notice alert: this conference is tomorrow!

One of the best times I had last year was at the 2006 Business Smart tools conference. I work with Valorie on a number of blogs, and helped her out a little bit at last year’s conference, by attempting some live blogging:

• Business Smart Tools Conference is on!
• David Pogue at Business Smart Tools Conference
• Mike Dunn on Podcasting
• Matt Kain on Search Engine Marketing
• David Parmet on Blogging
• Stamford CT will never be the same

This year, Valorie Luther of Creative Concepts, has taken the 2007 Business Smart Tools conference to a new level, and yet managed to reduced the registration fee. Unfortunately, I can’t make it this year, which is killing me. This is a great conference at a very affordable admission, and not to be missed, in my not-so-humble opinion. And what’s not to like in this agenda?

11:30-12:00	Doors Open, Light Lunch Served
12:00-12:15	Welcome
	Valorie Luther, Creative Concepts
12:15-12:45	Trends, Past and Future
	Patrick Quinn, PQ Media
12:45-1:30	New Media Business Basics
	Scott McRae, Creative Change Web Business StrategiesAlbert Maurggi, Provident Partners Blogging/PodcastingAndrew DiFiore, answerYES Interactive Advergaming and Viral Marketing Marshall Kirkpatrick, Splashcast Web Syndication David Vinjamuri, Thirdway/NYU Moderator
1:30-2:00	Corporate Video for a YouTube Era
	Rahul Sonnad, thePlatform Video LiquidityMatt DeLoca, the Feedroom Corporate VideoDavid Vinjamuri, Thirdway/NYU Moderator
2:00-2:15	Break
2:15-2:30	Business Smart Tools Angel Award
2:30-3:15	Second Life, a Virtual Existence for Business
	Greg Verdino, Digitas
3:15-5:00	The Real Story, Does New Media Work for Business
3:15-3:35 3:35-3:55 3:55-4:15 4:15-4:35 4:35-5:00	Ron Stevenson, General Electric Duane Schulz, Xerox Ben Edwards, Economist.com Chris Barger, General Motors Panel (Chris, Duane, Ben, Ron)
5:00	Closing Words
	Valorie Luther, Creative Concepts
5:00-6:00	Networking Cocktail Party

So check it out!

On my to-do list since March has been to write about the upcoming SOBCon , put on by Liz Strauss and Phil Gerbyshak

It’s going to be in Chicago, on May 11 - 12. I just realized that the block of rooms reserved for this will be released today, so you have to move fast if you want to be at the convention hotel.

Having met Liz and read her blogs for years, I know she is one blogger who really gets it about creating relationships. Here’s what’s on the agenda at SOBCon:

Together we will strategize, discuss, and learn how to

• respect that in business and blogging all things are based in connecting relationships
• treat our blogs like a business, or a business-like hobby
• define a vision for our blogs that inspires others to be part of it
• identify like-minded bloggers whose blogging goals match our own
• evaluate our work through the eyes of a first time reader
• use links, trackbacks, and comments to lead to increased participation, extended reach, and relationships that could develop into business ventures
• ensure that navigation, in presentation, and in all reader experiences, is intuitive, simple, and elegant
• know our brand values as readers define them and be able to articulate the unique and remarkable values we offer
• understand basic tools that are useful in adding video, podcasting, social media, and voice commenting
• reach out beyond the blogosphere to nonblogging readers to become a resources they rely on
• recognize the traits and characteristics of a successful and outstanding blog

Presenters with specialized experience, will get the conversation started, and together presenters and attendees will work interact to get you where you need to go - to take your blogging to the next level.

What’s not to like? I think the price is reasonable for two days of learning, networking, and sharing ideas.

I’d be there if I could, and I think anyone who can make it should go. Speaking as someone who comes to blogging because of fascination with its technical aspects, I could sure use the info being shared at the con. You can learn more about successful and outstanding blogging in two days in Chicago than what some bloggers are taking years to figure out, if they do at all.

Technorati : SOBCon07

I went down to Podcamp NYC 2007 yesterday, April 7, and had a great time.

Valorie Luther, from Creative Concepts, gave a talk on Corporate Blogging, and I helped out by creating the presentation slides, and offering some tech support. Follow the link to the post on her blog, if you want to see the slides.

The audience was great, and Valorie is a fantastic public speaker. Anil Dash, from Six Apart, was in the audience. We had a brief conversation with him afterward, and hope to talk more in the future. He’s one of the bloggers I was reading early on, when I first started investigating the whole blogging world.

We didn’t have time to stay at the conference, but did manage to catch Adam Varga’s presentation on Building Dialog With Your Audience (using voicemail, message boards, and wikis). He is one sharp guy and really understands about building community! I came away with some good ideas and a better understanding of the technologies and issues in community building.

I was particularly struck by his points on the cons of using Wikis as a way to build community. Wikis don’t allow for a conversation, for responding to points, and it’s hard to see where the action is. You don’t see right away what’s new, what’s busy, where the latest info is. Wikis, I believe, are more of a way for an already established community to build something together. I think Etienne Wenger (who’s written a lot about communities of practice) calls that “reification.” In my understanding, for communities, reification means a documentation of already established actions, for reference and further action.

Adam did a great job and I hope he puts his notes up on his site. I’d put up mine from his talk, but I’m trying to be less delusional about how much time I actually have for things like that.

I’ve gone to two blogging conferences this year — BlogHer and the Blog Business Summit.

BlogHer was about the blogging experience, focusing on how it relates to women, of course. The Blog Business Summit was about how to understand blogs — what they can do for businesses and how they’re being used today.

The people I met at BBS seemed to be either from PR & Marketing firms, or from big businesses. I met very nice people from Visa International, Nordstrom, and Mastercard, to name a few of the big corps that are checking out blogging.

These folks are still figuring out how best to use blogs — some want to use it internally, some to converse with customers or suppliers.

There were some small business bloggers at the panel on blogging for small businesses, moderated by Jory Des Jardins. The panelists included Kevin O’Keefe of Lexblog, Stan Mackey, (who’s real estate blog I wrote about in June) But for some reason, I personally didn’t meet any folks from non-tech and non-PR smaller businesses who wanted to use blogging to help them.

On the attendees list of the conference, I also found:

• Verity Credit Union’s blog
• Phil Mann’s IP Litigator blog

So I know a few of these folks were there, I just didn’t try hard enough to find them.

I think some of the early feedback from the conference was that people wanted to hear more case histories and stories from larger companies who were blogging, not tech insider stuff (but I love that techy stuff!). Perhaps there should be a track on that as the conference grows. These folks wanted to know how other companies handled the internal resistance to blogging, for example.

This conference is something smaller businesses who are thinking about blogging should check out, too.  The price for the conference wasn’t bad, especially if you got in on the early-bird rate.  Of course, for Connecticut and environs, Seattle was a long way to go.

I think there’s still plenty of needs that these conferences can address for large and small businesses. But Blog Business Summit is definitely on the right track! I’m glad I went and I look forward to the next one.

But I never did find out why “Blog Business Summit” and not “Business Blog Summit.”

Ok, I gotta admit, they responded (with a form letter) pretty fast.

Here’s their reason #1:

The error you received is typically caused by unusual activity from either your computer or your Internet Service Provider (ISP) to Yahoo!.

I guess it’s because I’m using the Bell Harbor Conference Center wi-fi.  Does that mean that everyone at the Blog Business Summit is locked out, or is it just me?

I’m at the Blog Business Summit conferece, and the session’s about to start, but I wanted to share two observations:

Many people typing on their laptops simultaneously sounds like raindrops falling on a roof.

And, a great way to tell when a speaker is saying something interesting is when the typing sounds get lounder, as people start pounding on their keyboards as fast as they can.

Today I’m heading out west to Seattle for the Blog Business Summit. I’m looking forward to this, and to Seattle, which I’ve never been to.

There are going to be lots of great sessions, and even a BlogHer meetup on Thursday.

I’m missing the whole pre-conference workshop, which has sessions to help the new blogger get up and running. I just didn’t have the time free. Oh well.

Also, I’m going to try to do a better job of blogging during the conference, but don’t hold your breath. I still haven’t looked at all my notes from BlogHer06.

But, if anyone has any questions for this great lineup of speakers, let me know. I’ll ask.

After days of anticipating and planning to attend, I decided at the last minute not to go to Podcamp Boston. Now I regret that, because it looks to have been one hell of a conference. Rats.

But Podcamp Boston lives on, online. The hard-working folks have been busy uploading podcasts and updating their site.

There’s lots of great audio here, folks, including talk about podcasting equipment, with David Berlind of CNET, and a session with Kevin Marks of Technorati called Bootleg webcasting to instant videoblog - How to bring remote people into live events, and blog the video afterwards.

And I just have to share with you about how cool Bloglines is. I use Bloglines for all my RSS feeds (subscriptions). And when there’s a post with an audio file, they include a little audio player, right in the feed post! This is great for when you just want to check out the audio without downloading a huge file. It’s just gotten that much easier to keep up.

Technorati : PodCamp Boston

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

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

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m at BlogHer 06, and I’ll be glad to ask your questions, if you put them in the comments. I tried to post this last night, but the site was apparently down for a bit. Seems ok now.

Here are the sessions for Day Two that I plan on attending today (except for early morning yoga)– what would you like to know about them? Ask questions in the comments, if you’re curious.

• Get Deeply Geeky.
  BlogHers want to talk technology and gender. Is the web itself a feminine construct? How about open source? Join Laura Scott, mir verburg, Nancy White & futurist Melanie Swan to discuss.

  To tell you the truth, I don’t care about the gender part — I just want to talk tech!

• Business Blog Case Studies
  Yvonne DiVita, Susan Getgood & Toby Bloomberg lead a rap session with you, the BlogHers, about what worked (and what didn’t) when implementing blogs for business.

  I’m very much looking forward to this one.

• Group Blogging
  Mandy Moore from the KnittingBloggers community, Iris Rodriguez & Veronica Hernandez from Smashcast and Sarah Gilbert & Asha Dornfest from Portland Urban Mamas are among those who have dealt with the practical & inspirational realities of building online blog communities.

I love that this conference is so wired — people have laptops open at every table, wi-fi connections (sometimes flaky when lots of people are logged on), plenty of plugs for laptops. It’s great.

But, just like at work, it’s tempting to check email while people are talking, instead of listening and taking notes!

Technorati : BlogHer

For the final two BlogHer 06 sessions I plan on attending tomorrow(I’m exhausted just thinking about all the stuff I’m going to learn):

• Video:

For the beginning or new user. We’re bringing back Video Goddess Ryanne Hodson, along with Zadi Diaz, to help you walk away ready to add video posts to your blog.

• Design/Style/Customization:

Want to make your blog your own? DIY or pay? And what’s reasonable in time & money? Miriam Verburg and Tiffany Brown walk you thru it, plus stylesheets (CSS) and how they work.

So don’t be shy — if there’s anything you want me to ask, leave a comment.

Technorati : BlogHer

Continuing with my idea of posting about the sessions I plan on attending on Day One of BlogHer ‘06, here are two more:

• Audio/Podcasting

Instructors will be on hand to serve all user levels. Beginners will create & post an audio entry with Susan Kitchens. Advanced users will get hands-on instruction and interactive Q&A about advanced techniques, plus best practices in promotion and distribution from Nicole Simon and Anita Campbell.

• Audience Building

Elise Bauer talks traffic: how to build it, how to understand your site statistics, how to optimize your site to build search engine traffic, how to use syndication and subscriptions to build recurring traffic…the works!

We’ll see what I learn. Don’t hesitate to give me your questions to ask at the sessions.

Technorati : BlogHer

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m at BlogHer ‘06, and I want to write about the sessions I plan on attending at BlogHer. That way, anyone who reads this before the session can give me a question they’d like me to ask for them.

The first workshop session I plan on attending on Friday July 28 is called So, You Have This Crazy Idea. As it says in the session description:

You want to start a community-based blog site, but aren’t sure where to start. Melanie Morgan, Nancy White, Susannah Gardner & Lauren Gelman are among those who will help you examine what’s out there, define what you can do differently, and create a plan to develop content, promote your efforts and watch your back….

This session is a how-to from a bigger-picture and more holistic perspective. How to tame a crazy idea, find out if it’s worth pursuing, figure out how-to pursue it, and pursue it with confidence. We have lined up four women who are uniquely qualified to help you do just that.

I plan on picking up some tips on blogs that center around a community of practice or interest. That can be an actual physical community, such as New York City, or it can be a community of practice such as lawyers, programmers, even bloggers.

Aside from learning more about community-based blogs, I expect that I’ll pick up some good tips on fostering community that would apply to any blog.

So if anyone has any questions they’d like me to ask, leave a comment here and I’ll try to get them answered.

Technorati : BlogHer