Blog World and New Media Expo Highlights

Hi all,

I feel like crap this morning. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since I arrived and I’ve been eating on the fly and it’s catching up to me. My first order of business this morning was searching for an overpriced fruit cup…and ok…a cafe mocha. That isn’t to say I’m not enjoying myself. I’m having a very good time. I met some wonderful people including Allen Stern whose name I misspelled at About Weblogs yesterday and for which I apologize profusefly, Wendy Piersall from eMoms at Home and much of the b5Media team – a good bunch of people all around.

So even though today is officially the Blog World and New Media Expo opening day, there was some good stuff going on yesterday as well. b5Media put on a day of classes and by the end of the day I was happy I rearranged my schedule to attend. I learned a lot and enjoyed participating in some enlightening discussions. Here are some highlights – sorry for the photo quality. The room was dark and I had a hard time seeing my subjects in the little screen on the back of my outdated digital camera.

My favorite session was Aaron Brazell and Tris Hussey‘s talk on Social Media, especially the whole Digg “fan boy” hierarchy.

Some of it was stuff I already learned, such as Digg’s mainly male members don’t want anything to do with the likes of me and my girly headlines. There’s also a hierarchy involved, so if you don’t know one of the top Diggers, your not going to make it to the front page. We did receive some great tips for appealing to other Diggers and getting the votes. There were lots of recommended favorite alternatives such as Stumble Upon and Twitter. Twitter is something I’ve been reluctant to explore, but after hearing all of the positive stories, I’m more willing to give it a try.

Next up were Allen Stern and Jeremy Wright discussing survival as a B-List blogger.

They talked about the importance of providing good “sticky” content – and not just regurgitating what the other bloggers are saying. How it’s great to discuss the same things, but adding your own spin and point of view is key – it’s not enough to post a press release and leave it at that. One thing I found interesting was how they felt having “exclusives” isn’t so important. It’s how you write up the news – let someone else be first to post and add your own insight. Other tips: don’t underestimate the power of the natural search, make it easy for your readers to find what they’re looking for by using special plugins and linking to old content and “finding that thing that no one else has.” Incidentally, Jeremy called on me to ask how I find things to write about and I gave credit where credit was due – I told him I have this great community and most of my inspiration comes from you, your comments and your mail.

Next Session Marshall Kirkpatrick and Tris Hussey (seen here with Jeremy Wright in the middle) gave us a peek into what’s in their problogger toolkit.

Without going through a very long and detailed laundry list, here are some essential items in their problogging toolkits: “If you’re not using these, you should be.”

• A good browser such as Firefox
• RSS Readers
• Twitter (Again with the Twitter!)
• Image Editor
• Offline Blog Editor

In the weeks following Blog Expo, Ill get into more detail about the things I learned here and add my own thoughts and experiences.

I don’t have a good picture of Brian Layman and Mark Jaquith, I’m sorry to say, but their talk on amping up your WordPress blog gave me lots of ideas of the things I can do to make my blogs better. The slide show is available on Mark’s blog, by the way. Some highlights:

• SEO tips
• Static files hosted on another domain/box
• Important plugins to help manage spam, enable people to subscribe to comments and more.

Another session that was especially informative to me was Leora Zellman and MaryJo Manzares talk about surviving as a network blogger – but really it was about surviving as a full time blogger.

Mary Jo and Leora talked about finding a work/life balance especially finding time to work, taking time for yourself and convincing others you really have a job.

Here’s something fun I learned. I didn’t bring my laptop but many others did. I gauged the audience interest by what people were doing with their laptops. If the speakers were talking about interesting topics, no one really did anything with their laptops other than take notes. If it got a little boring people starting checking email, Twitter, Skype and surfing the net. (You know who you are ).A stellar job b5 and all the speakers. An amazing day of learning – by the time the day was over I thought my brain would explode. I did sneak a peek at the conference floor where the different exhibitors were setting up. Some interesting stuff going on – podcasts, b5′s poker table and lots of swag. I can’t wait to bring you more!

- Deb