I forgot to take my camera out of the little safe in my room, so I’m sorry to tell you I have no pictures from Blog Word and New Media Expo today. If you visit the Expo’s blog, you’ll see some of the fun stuff going on.

First a few shout outs:

A very special thanks to Kelly Taylor and Abigail Keller from the Bohle Company who set me up with a press pass, signed me in, and couldn’t have been more helpful.

Here are some of the places I visited and people I met along the way:

• Krista Neher from Phototrade, a service I’ll surely be looking into.
• Easton and Mark from Know More Media, a network that will always have a special place in my heart. If you’re at the Expo, stop by their booth for a little Wii action.
• The Red Lasso crew, as a celeb blogger, I’m especially interested in learning more about this nifty video search tool.
• Kristina Serafim from CoComment, thanks for sitting down and taking the time to explain this wonderful comment management tool and answer all my questions. You’ll definitely be hearing more from me in the future.
• The folks from Tech Sailor. Thanks for talking with me.
• Jaqueline Jones from The Jackie Jones challenge. It was VERY nice talking with you and I’m sure we’ll talk more in the future.
• Prija from Blogging the Movie. It was wonderful to meet you and I’m pleased everything is working out.
• Brad Finn and Lisa Martin - I told you at lunch I’d write something nice, here it is.
• John Hong from Zappos.com - It was a pleasure meeting you. Thanks for the invite.

I attended several sessions, all either about monetizing blogs or community building. In fact, I even wrote a piece on monetizing for Peformancing while taking a break. Here are some of the highlights:

Jeremy Shoemaker, Assaf Henkein and Rebecca Weeks led a discussion on Smart Ways to Monetize your Blog. Included was the importance of collecting demographics, using heat maps to learn about the ads your bloggers use, getting direct ads sales, pricing your own ad sales and more.

I found Jim Kukral’s talk “Good to Great: Blogging & Profit Potential” especially inspiring. Jim provided simple advice in talk everyone can understand. Here’s something to consider - if you have a blog with 5,000 pages of content and each of these pages makes ten cents per day in revenue, you’ll be earning upwards of $182, 250 per year. Only 4, 000 and some odd pages to go!

As you know, I find my community to be the most important part of blogging. So I looked forward to the session about building blog community. It was led by Wendy Piersall and included Matt Coburn and Dave Nalle. Discussed was the imporance of commenting and ways to get others to comment. I did mention my commenting contests here. While I believe this session was very informative, I regretted taking it only because it was stuff I already knew. Those just starting out or looking for ways to encourage commenting would certainly benefit from the panel’s wisdom.