2008 September | Vegas Geek

Blog World Expo 2008 – Day 2 Recap

September 21, 2008

Day 2 of Blog World Expo started off exactly as I suspected… late. I don’t know that I have ever been to a conference where the final day has started on time. Especially a conference held in Las Vegas. I think the only way to have a final day session start on time in Las Vegas is to make sure the final day doesn’t start until noon.

The keynote today wasn’t so much a speech as it was a dialog/Q&A with Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Work Week and Mike Shinoda, singer from Linkin Park moderated by Rohit Bhargava. They talked about building your personal brand and how it pays to be more interested than interesting. Rohit asked them the best question I had heard all weekend: How important to your success has it been to not be an asshole?” This headed the conversation towards how it is important to be nice to people you may think are non-important at the time. You never know which person is going to have the connection or cause you to be in a certain place at the exact right time. Tim also spoke about setting goals but know what the goals give you when you get there. He also suggested to “Talk to your readers like you would talk to your friends after 2 beers.”

The first session of the day I went to was called “My Blog is a Business? Building a Foundation that Can Help You Grow Your Blog Past the Hobby Stage” The panel consisted of Chris Brogan, Rob McNealy, Jeremy Wright and Nina Yablok and was moderated by Jim Kukral. The panel for this session was pretty amusing. Definitely a bunch of characters here. Nina forced them all to give their top keys to becoming a business in less than 5 minutes.

Chris made the following points: Be helpful in your space, write from your customer/reader’s side of the fence, don’t do a sales pitch.

Jeremy said he has 3 simple rules: think less, plan less, do more stupid shit. Don’t get caught up in trying to make things perfect. Of course, he didn’t mean that you should throw any crap together and expect to make money. But I think you get the idea.

Rob pointed out the following: professional bloggers work their asses off 80+ hours a week. Embrace the hard work to be successful, and, if you love what you do and are passionate about it, it doesn’t really seem like hard work.

The next session was called “Beyond Adsense: Exploration of Practical Monetization Streams“. This panel had David Berkowitz, Jason Billingsley, Michael Buechele and Matt Hulett and was moderated by Angel Djambazov. This session had a lot to do with tools each use for making money on their blogs. Mostly ad networks, affiliate links, software to display ads on WordPress blogs, etc. For me this session was mainly review and didn’t have a lot of new content, but there were several people in the crowd frantically taking notes, so I was definitely in the minority there.

Next was the Networking Reception on the Show Floor. During this time I made one final trip around the show room floor. I grabbed a couple more business cards and flyers and broke my rule from yesterday and collected 2 new T-shirts (thanks, Lijit). I drank a couple Jones Sodas (cream soda, yum!) and I picked up these two bottles that I think I’m going to go ahead and save for a while. I had some chicken fingers and chips and then I spoke with a few people about WordCamp:Las Vegas. By the time I was done, there was still another hour left before the next session started. I realized that my recent travel schedule plus the marathon day yesterday had left me wiped out. I decided to pack it in and head on home.

I had a great time at BlogWorld once again and I’m already looking forward to next year’s event. I hope to see you all there!

Filed Under: Technology, WordPress Tagged With: blog, Blog World Expo, Blogging, blogworldexpo, bwe08

Blog World Expo 2008 – Day 1 Recap

September 21, 2008

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year since the last Blog World Expo. I have been looking forward to this event for quite a while and I’m glad to say that at the end of day 1, I was not disappointed.

The day started off with the “State of the Blogosphere Adress” & Opening Keynote. Richard Jalichandra from Technorati started out by giving some really interesting numbers related to blogging and how blogs are changing the face of media. For example:
- 4 of the top 10 entertainment sites are blogs (OMG, TMZ, Asylum, Perez Hilton)
- 7.4 million blogs posted in the last 120 days
- 1.5 million in the last 30 days
- 2/3 of bloggers are male
- 50% of bloggers are 18/34
- 70% have college degrees
- 72% of blogs publish in English

There is a bunch more and Technorati is set to release the results of a huge study they’ve been doing. Be sure to check out their site on Monday for the full update.

After Richard, Chris Aldren and Anil Dash from Six Apart took the stage. They spoke about the power of blogs and where blogging is headed and they asked the question what should blogging 2.0 be? They spent a lot of time talking about the products available from Six Apart (Movable Type, Type Pad, Vox, Blogs.com, BlogIt, etc.) which didn’t go over really well with the people I was sitting near (myself included.) Though, I will say that I’m quite interested in checking out BlogIt which is a tool for managing your blog from your iPhone. If it works better than the WordPress iPhone app, I’ll definitely switch to using it until the WP app catches up.

The first breakout session I went to was Making Money Online with a Blog. This panel contained John Chow, Brian Clark, Zac Johnson, Darren Rowse and Jeremy Schoemaker and was moderated by Jim Kukral. In this session they talked about which forms of advertising made them the most money (direct ad sales being #1, affiliate links being #2 and google adwords being #3, except in the case of CopyBlogger where he makes his money by selling information products and subscriptions), they talked about tools they use for selling ads automatically and the biggest point they tried to drive home is that you need to be passionate about what you blog about. If not, it’s going to show in your content and you’ll likely never make any real money.

During the session they had people come up to the mic and tell them their URL. They would pull it up on the screen and they’d take turns telling the person ways to improve their site in order to make money. Even though I didn’t go to the mic, I was still able to apply the things being said to my own site. There are changes coming soon.

After lunch I went to the Power Widgets to Amp Your Blog session. As a breakout session, I’m on the fence about it still. But, that being said, I got a fantastic look at Lijit and am glad I got to see it. Sure, I could have gone for a demo on the show floor, but I’m stubborn and thought I already knew what Lijit had to offer. The other presenters were WidgetBox, OutBrain and PicApp. All of which had something cool to offer. Widgetbox has 135,000 widgets for you to use on your site. They can also create a widget of your blog content that can then be added to other sites. I especially liked the idea of creating a content mashup widget. I’ll have to research that a bit more this week. OutBrain is a widget that creates a “you might like:” section at the bottom of each of your posts and links to other posts that have similar content. You can have it pull in content from the web, from a selection of sites you provide, or you can lock it down to just your own blog. And finally PicApp. This app gives bloggers access to photos from sites like Getty Images without having to purchase them. Instead, they add a box underneath each image that they monetize for the photographer who took the shot. The nice part is, you can have access to high quality images without running the risk of getting sued for using unlicensed content.

The final session of the day for me was Creating Customer Loyalty with Social Media. This was, by far, the best attended session. Every seat was filled and there were people standing along the back and both side walls. The panel consisted of Toby Bloomberg, Tony Hsieh, Brian Solis and Frank Eliason and moderated by Becky Carroll. The main point being that people build relationships with people, not with companies. Companies that try to control all the messaging that is put out by the company are doing there customers, and themselves a great disservice by acting in this way. Comcast’s policy for web content is this:
- disclose that you work for comcast
- if you have access to private information, don’t make it public
- use your best judgement

Tony from Zappos expanded on that by saying that your company culture has to revolve around proving good customer service. By not letting your employees have an online voice, you’re basically saying that you don’t trust your employees. (I’m also happy to say that after seeing this post about Tony giving Bunny Ears to people like Bill Gates, Serena Williams and Penn Jillett, I now have my very own bunny ears shot with Tony!)

Aside from the sessions, I made several great connections with people who I’ve been looking forward to meeting in person. I think I may have secured another couple of speakers for WordCamp:Las Vegas in January and have laid the ground work with a few companies who may sponsor a portion of the event as well. More on that in the coming weeks.

Tomorrow I’ll write about my experience in the expo hall and a recap of day 2. Stay tuned.

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: blog, Blog World Expo, Blogging, bwe08, plugins, tools, WordPress

I hate being late

September 19, 2008

Tomorrow is the first day of the main Blog World Expo. I’ve been looking forward to this event since the close of Blog World last year. The show last year was amazing and given the list of speakers that are going to be at this year’s event, there’s no doubt this year is going to be even better.

Darren Rowse from problogger.net and Digital Photography School had set up a photo walk to take place earlier this evening. I got off work, went home and packed my camera bag and we headed over to meet up with the group. I knew we were cutting it just a little bit too close, but throw in some extra traffic and we were going to be 10 minutes late. As we arrived and were walking to the meeting spot, we were already a few minutes late, but I thought I had seen the group just a minute before. Then, a guy and gal asked if I could take their photo in front of the casino. Of course I couldn’t refuse. I took their photo and then we set out to find the group. I was pretty certain that I saw the group walking in to the casino. We hurried in and had to luck finding them.

Since we had made the trip, we went ahead and had our own photo walk through Caesar’s Palace. I took only a few photos with my digital but took several with my film cameras. I’ll get them processed early next week and will upload them as part of the follow up to Blog World Expo.

Hopefully I won’t need to wait until Blog World 09 before I get the opportunity for another large scale Photo Walk. No matter what, for the next one, I’ll be the first guy to show up.

Filed Under: Photography, Ranting Tagged With: blog, bwe08, photo walk, Photography

CJU 2008 Recap

September 18, 2008

I’m sitting in the Santa Barbara airport waiting for my flight back home after spending the previous 3 days at the CJU conference. I have an hour to kill so I figured I may as well get started on this post while things are fresh in my mind.

Day 1
The first event of the conference didn’t start until 1PM on Tuesday. I spent the morning having breakfast, getting my hair cut and doing the tourist thing on State Street. I then made an awesome rookie mistake and I showed up at the corporate offices of CJ around noon and announced, “I’m here for CJU.” The lady who answered the door says, “uh, that’s down the street at the hotel by the water.” Oops.

I show up at the hotel about 10 minutes after 12 and check in and get my welcome package. It’s a CJ bag with a notebook that has a metal cover and the CJ logo embossed on the front. Inside it has the schedule for the conference and about 50 sheets of lined paper. This came in quite handy. Also included in the package were a pen and a tape measure from show sponsor Home Depot. I put the pen and notepad in my messenger bag and left the bag and the tape measure on a table filled with a number of CJ bags with tape measures left inside. A cool gift to be sure, just not something I wanted to carry for 7 hours before I returned to the hotel.

The first breakout sessions were to be held at 1PM. But, I had requested a CJU Lab appointment and they scheduled me for 1PM. CJU Lab is a one-on-one consultation with a CJ employee. They will log in to your account and answer any questions you have. These sessions are supposed to be 45 minutes long. I got amazingly lucky and got to stretch that appointment to nearly 3.5 hours. If I got back on the plane and headed home immediately following my CJU Lab, it would have been worth the entire price of the trip. Big thanks to Risa. She’s a CJ Rock Star and really knows how to dig in to the CJ data. She made the mistake of giving me her card with her phone number and email address. She may live to regret that.

Unfortunately due to the length of my Lab appointment, I missed the second set of breakout sessions as well. The next event we took part in was the Mixer that took place at the Santa Barbara Zoo. I made a few contacts and I got to feed a giraffe. Not a bad mixer if you ask me.

Day 2
The keynote speaker for the event was Guy Kawasaki. I really enjoyed his talk. He kept the mood light, even telling a Microsoft and Mac joke about screwing in light bulbs. I previously wrote about his keynote, so I won’t cover too much of it here. I’d just like to say that CJ did a great job picking Guy as their keynote speaker. I urge you to check out Youtube for some of guy’s work. Also, he has published a number of books that you may be interested in. I plan on checking out a couple myself.

After a short break we went to the Exploring Affiliate Marketing Opportunities hosted by Jupiter Research. The covered a lot of information about trends with consumers purchasing and how things are looking for the future. This information didn’t hold a lot of interest for us, but there were about 200 people in attendance for the session so it held a lot of interest for quite a few people.

Remember when I said Risa was a Rock Star? As we were leaving this session, Risa spots me and runs up and stops us. She had done some research over night to answer an important question that came up during our lab appointment. See what I mean? Rock Star!

After lunch I came back and went to the Web 2.0 Affiliate Marketing in Practice session. This was my favorite session of the week. They were driving home the point of using social media in order to drive traffic to a site. Melissa Salas from Buy.com was a panelist. She is somebody who has completely bought in to the social media phenomenon. She blogs, she twitters, she’s in the forums, she’s doing whatever it takes to make the connections. Many of the topics that they spoke about I was familiar with, but listening to somebody who is an evangelist for the methods was informative and a lot of fun.

The next session was called Where Do You Rank in The CJ Marketplace? This was focused on the data available inside of CJ and which data you can use to rate your publishers. They also spoke about ways to make your offers stand out in your vertical and how to offer select publishers incentives that can cause them to drive mass traffic to your offer. If the previous session was my favorite, this one was a close second.

Day 3
The final day of CJU was pretty light. We had a breakfast buffet overlooking the ocean followed by CJU’s Believe it or Not. This was a game show like presentation where had 3 advertisers making up 1 team and 3 publishers making up the other team. The host asked a series of questions that each team had to agree if it was true or false. Most of the questions were designed to show off some specific stats for CJ. Things like the number of publishers driving over a million dollars in product sales and other similar questions. Not a lot of useful learning to be had in this session. It was more of an entertainment session.

The final session we attended was called Innocent Until Proven Guilty. This was an interesting discussion. They had 4 panelists who where talking about how top publishers are all using data feeds from the advertisers to create shopping sites. But, their big complaint is the fact that all data feeds basically suck. Rather than the advertiser spending time to clean up the data feed, it becomes the onus of the publishers to make sure the feed is clean. This is a huge time waster and is likely costing everybody large sums of money. Rather than spending their time trying to drive traffic and sales, each publisher is having to spend their time doing manual cleanup of the data. Even though I don’t use the data feeds, I can certainly feel their frustration.

After the final session, everybody went outside to have lunch. But, before lunch started they held the drawing for the door prize. A Mini Cooper. I’m quite sad to say that I didn’t win.

I enjoyed my time in Santa Barbara and at CJU. I met some great people, I learned some very interesting information and I’ve come home with a To Do list that’s a mile long. I have big plans for our programs and I’m looking forward to digging in and growing the relationships with our publishers and help them earn more money by providing them the tools and support they need to succeed.

I also came away with a goal for myself. By this time next year I want to triple the number of leads being sent in by our publishers. I’m not fooling myself and thinking it’s going to be an easy task. However, by putting in some effort and constantly asking how we can help our pubs, I certainly think it’s doable.

We shall see.

Filed Under: General, Technology Tagged With: affiliate marketing, blog, cj, CJU

The art of the keynote

September 17, 2008

Over the past couple years, I’ve seen a fair amount of keynote speakers. I’ve realized that the keynotes that I remember the most are the ones where I was entertained along the way. if the speaker comes out and throws data and stats at me for an hour, first off, I’m probably going to stop listening about 10-15 minutes in. I’m also likely to forget anything and everything they’ve said by the time I get back home.

This morning at CJU I watched the keynote given by Guy Kawasaki. Luckily for me, and for Guy, he is an entertaining speaker. He talks about how he’s listened to thousands of different pitches from people who think they have the next huge product to hit the market. I’m sure it’s listening to all of these that has molded his speech giving in to the form it is today. He says he gives his speech as a 10 point list. This way, if he sucks, at least you have an idea as ho how much longer he’s going to suck.

I won’t recount his entire speech, but there were a few points he made that really stood out for me. The first was “Make a Mantra”. Your company should have a mantra, not a mission statement. He told a GREAT story about how companies go about creating mission statements by sending the management team on an offsite event where everybody has to get in at least 1 word. At one in particular, one of the members submitted a mission statement that was taken directly from the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator. It came in 3rd in voting.

The second point he made that I really liked was “Let 100 Flowers Blossom”. When you create a product, you have an idea of who your target audience is. But, when you get your product to market, it’s not always the people you think are going to buy your product that end up being your best customers. you may think it’s going to be Fortune 500 business men but find out it’s college students. If that happens, don’t waste your effort going to the Fortune 500 guys and asking why they don’t like it. Instead, go to the college students, find out how they are using it and what they like about it and then, give them more of it.

If you ever get called upon to give a keynote, I strongly suggest you check out a couple Guy Kawasaki videos before you do. The worst that will happen is that you’ll give an engaging talk and people will be entertained and blog about you when it’s all done.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: blog, CJU, dilbert, keynote

Ask the concierge first

September 16, 2008

I’m currently on a business trip in Santa Barbara. It’s my first time in Santa Barbara and finding a place to have a nice dinner was one of the first things I had to do once I arrived. I had spent some time walking around the pier and I found what looked to be a decent restaurant called Moby Dick Restaurant. After I was finished exploring, I returned to my hotel, changed clothes and headed back to the pier for dinner. The view from the restaurant was amazing. It overlooked the harbor, and at sunset, the it was absolutely gorgeous. Unfortunately, that’s the best thing I can say about my dinner. My meal was overpriced ($40 for a steak, 4 shrimp, chowder and a soda) and not very good.

Tonight I went out to dinner with my coworker and his family. Since they had their small child with them, I figured letting them choose the place to eat was the wise thing to do. As we drove up State Street, we passed a place called The Original Enterprise Fish Company. After a little navigational fun trying to find their parking lot, we went inside. I had a very good swordfish dinner that was under $30 including chowder, a salad and soda. As we were finishing up dinner, I was telling the waitress my meal was so much better than the previous night. She asked us if we had ever eaten at Brophy’s. We said we hadn’t and she went on to tell us that most people choose Brophy’s over Enterprise stating that their clam chowder is excellent.

As I returned to the hotel and walked through the lobby, I stopped by the concierge and without giving him any other details I simply asked, “If you are going out to dinner, would you rather go to Brophy’s or Enterprise?” He takes no time at all to explain, “Definitely Brophy’s.” Duly noted, I know where I’m eating tomorrow night.

Had I asked the concierge prior to dinner on the first night, I’d have skipped the tourist trap meal on the first night. Thankfully I wised up and asked before it’s too late. I expect my final dinner in Santa Barbara to be much better than my first. If it’s not, believe me, I’ll let you know.

I wrote a review of Moby Dick Restaurant on Yelp.com. You can read it here.

Filed Under: Ranting Tagged With: blog, dinner, restaurant, Santa Barbara

What's missing from my iPhone

September 15, 2008

Now that I’ve had the new 3G iPhone for a little bit, I figured I’d write a post to complain about it. Not because I don’t like it. Quite the contrary. I love it. But, there are a few things still missing that would make my iPhone experience even better.

~~SMS~~ MMS messaging
I know this isn’t an original gripe, but still. Come on guys, I want to be able to take blurry photos and send them to my friends. I also want to be able to receive drunken party photos from my friends while they are out at the clubs.

Copy/Paste
As much as I would love to be able to blog from my iPhone, until I’m able to cut and paste, that just isn’t going to happen. Most of my blog posts have links to sites/products/whatever, and there’s no way I’m going to type out some crazy URLs to product pages buried deep within a site. I may as well try to write in braille.

Delete All
When I check my work email address, I scroll through, deal with the important emails and then delete them. This way I know the next time I look, any emails in my inbox need to be dealt with. I also have to delete all the spam that accumulates. After dealing with the good emails and I’m left with all the spam, deleting all would sure be handy.

Mark All As Read
Same general purpose as the delete all, except this is more important in gmail accounts where, if you delete an email, it’s deleted on gmail, too. Not just from your iPhone. In this case, marking them all as read so you can see a proper count of new emails would be useful. I may be alone on this one, but it’s my post…

Ability to switch between programs
Why can’t I have two programs running at once and then switch between them. If I’m in the middle of a killer game of Sudoku and I receive a text message and need to respond, when I’m done, I need to start the Sudoku application from the beginning rather than just switching back to it. In most cases, the games remember where you were at. But, that’s not the case with all apps. Plus, why should I have to wait 10-30 seconds for an app to load that I was just using a minute ago?

Sync with multiple computers
I have a desktop PC and a laptop that I would like to be able to use the iPhone as the go-between for syncing my music and my contacts. When I go on the road, having access to my full set of contacts on my laptop would be convenient. And, while I’m out on the road, if I buy a new album from iTunes, I want to be able to move it to my iPhone and/or desktop when I return home.

A few of these are keeping the iPhone from being the “Killer App” for me. I love it, but I have so much more love to give…

Leave me a comment and let me know what’s missing from YOUR iPhone.

Filed Under: Ranting Tagged With: blog, iPhone

Caption Contest Winner

September 15, 2008

… and the winner is…. [drum roll please]

Jason for this awesome entry:

Your $10 is on the way.

Thanks for all the entries. There will be another contest starting next week.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: winner