For being a first year conference, the expo hall had a pretty decent turn out with regards to exhibitors. Here’s a completely random list of some of the booths I visited and a bit about their product:

• Utterz.com – I have to be honest with you, at first glance I thought to myself, “so what.” Posting to my blog from my phone is something I can already do, so I wasn’t immediately sold on the idea. But, once I saw that you could post audio, video and text I was now interested. But the kicker for me was the fact that you could post to your own hosted WordPress blog, blogger.com account, facebook and other, well, ya got me. I’m a user now. You can check out my post from the expo floor here.
• SharedBook.com & Blurb.com – If you are looking to create a printed book of your photos or blog posts, both of these companies seem to be able to handle the task. I am quite surprised at just how inexpensive this service has become. I’m looking forward to creating a book of my trip to Alaska next year.
• Yovia.com – There are several pay-to-blog type sites out there and I have to say, I don’t think I’m a fan of any of them. I’ve signed up for a few but have never written a paid post on my site. Yovia, however, seems to be different in their approach. Rather than butcher an explanation, I’d suggest you head over to their site and give it a read.
• Unique Blog Designs – Sure, anybody can download a new theme for their blog. There are 1000s of them available free. But, if you are really looking to stand out, these guys will work with you to come up with a design that matches your tastes, your needs and your vision.
• BlogCatalog.com – When I met them in the expo hall, I had no idea how big they were. After a quick trip around their site, wow! Thousands upon thousands of blogs broken out in dozens of categories. You can browse by country or language as well. If you have a blog, you should definitely get yourself listed in this directory!
• Lijit.com – This is a pretty slick tool. If you produce content on a blog, myspace, youtube, flickr and/or several other sites, why not let your readers search all your content at once? Lijit provides a widget (or wijit, as they like to spell it) that well let your readers search all your your sources from a single search box. Very cool concept.
• fix8.com – Not everything you download or install has to be a productivity or money making tool, right? What’s wrong with just having some fun? Spruce up your video chats or youtube videos with all sorts of video overlays.
• techsmith.com – How could my list be complete without talking about one of my favorites? I’ve spoke several times before about the Jing Project. While they still don’t know exactly what will become of Jing, the employees absolutely love it and are dying to talk to you about it. They want every bit of feedback they can get their hands on. I think I made a new best friend when I told them that their service was something I would gladly pay a monthly subscription fee to have access to.

I, of course, didn’t mention everybody. There were quite a few others at the show and even more I met who didn’t have a booth. Be sure and check out these forward thinking companies. They are going to be the ones who help drive the development of new and more exciting/productive/useful tools that we will all benefit from. I hope you all had a successful show and look forward to meeting up with you next year to see what’s new!

It’s quite possible that day 1 of BlogWorld was so good that it set my expectations too high for day 2. After such a great day Thursday, I had really high hopes for Friday’s sessions. Though, after looking back at the schedule, be the titles alone I should have realized the content wasn’t going to be as strong. Nevertheless, here’s a report on the sessions I attended today.

The opening keynote speech was given by Anil Dash from (Live Journal, MovableType and Six Apart) followed by Leo Laporte (This Week in Tech).

Anil spoke mostly about openID and Google’s new Open Social, both of which I had heard of but didn’t know much about. The concept for Open Social being that apps written for use on social network sites should be able to be used across multiple sites and not tied to a specific site. With the growing number of social networking sites available, this should make life easier for both developers and users. I’m quite interested to see where this goes.

Leo spoke mainly about the differences between Main Stream Media and New Media and how we are moving away from being an audience and instead being a community. Moving away from the monologue and moving towards dialog. He also talked about how podcasting (though, he hates the term Podcasting) is currently a wide open medium in that there are no set rules for engagement. You don’t have to be sitting behind a desk wearing a suit to report the news any more.

The first breakout session I went to on Friday was “Blogworld Workshop – Producing Fun and Engaging Content“. This was supposed to be hosted by Brian Clark (copyblogger.com), but he was unable to attend. Instead it was hosted by Liz Strause (successful-blog.com). When I first walked away from this session, I was feeling pretty negative about it. But, after sleeping on it, I realize that it wasn’t bad, just different than I was expecting. I ended up taking away some very interesting tid-bits of information. For example:
- successful blogging is 20% writing and 80% connecting
- Don’t lecture – talk
- Every blog post doesn’t need to be completely flushed out. Let your readers add to it through the comments.
- In corporate blogging, be helpful, not hypeful.
- To make a post sticky it must have a head, a heart and let the reader know how it will fit in their life

The next session was “Leveraging Social Media for Your Company” hosted by Tom Gerace (gather.com) and Don Crowther (Affiliate Marketer). This turned out to be a great session. Tom and Don each spoke for a minute or two at the beginning and then asked the audience for some questions. They got 6 or 7 questions written down and then started going through them and providing answers in general terms that would apply to most everybody.

I could write an entire post just on the content from this session, but instead I’ll leave you with just a few things to think about:
- Two keys to success: Participation and Add Value to the Conversation
- If you aren’t talking about your products, others can be (both positively and negatively)
- Don’t pitch, constantly give and be transparent
- Provide access to information or even to resources not normally available

Next was “The Lazy Guide to Producing Great Podcasts” hosted by Glenn Reynolds (glennandhelenshow.com). Glenn hosts a popular political podcast where he conducts interviews. He pointed out immediately that he had nothing to do with the title of the session. He went on to discuss the equipment he uses (both software and hardware) along with the process he goes through to produce the show. He gave several low-cost tips on how to make your podcast sound as good as possible. While I normally steer clear of anything and everything dealing with politics, Glenn’s speech was informative and entertaining.

To close out the expo, the final keynote was given by Mark Cuban (blogmaverick.com). You may know Mark as being the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. Or, you may know him from one of the other myriad of projects he’s involved with. For me, this was the first time I had ever heard him speak for longer than a sound-byte on Sports Center. I admit I knew very little about his background, but I did know that he had been writing a blog for several years (though, I’ve never read it). After listening to Mark’s speech, I’m going to have to give his blog a read.

Mark told several quick stories, but the one that stood out to me most was about how blogging and other new media outlets are going to change the way people get their news. A few years ago Mark had done a 6 or 7 question interview with the Dallas Morning News via email. A few days later when the article was printed in the paper, it looked nothing like the interview that had taken place. So Mark took all the back-and-forth emails that had gone on for the interview and posted them on his blog letting the readers know exactly what was said originally. If you think about it, that’s really, REALLY powerful and should give major news outlets reason to look over their shoulder.

For a first year expo, I’d have to say BlogWorldExpo did a great job! Every session I went to started on time (give or take 3 minutes), none of the sessions felt over crowded, the registration price was quite reasonable and the information gathered was invaluable. Not to mention the amazing amount of networking that gets done on the expo hall floor, at lunch and dinner and in the halls between sessions. I’m already looking forward to next year’s expo. I hope to see you there!

I have but one request for next year’s expo. In every session, there needs to be power strips available for the mass amount of laptops. Cheers!

When I first sat down to write a post about my day at BlogWorld I had planned to write about the sessions and all the great vendors I met up with in the expo hall. I realize that’s going to be far too much for one post. So instead, this post is going to just cover the Day 1 sessions I attended. A post about the expo hall will follow later.

The day started with the BlogWold Opening Keynote Presentation. The keynote was a bit of a Q&A between Ed Sussman from FastCompany.com (also Inc.com) and Matt Mullenweg who is the founding developer of WordPress. Ed asked the questions and Matt provided the answers which he deftly weaved in to a “state of the union” of where the blogging industry (both content & software) are at now and where things are heading.

While he had a lot of interesting things two say, the two points that brought me the most joy were:
- WordPress will ALWAYS be an open source project.
- WordPress is working towards an “auto-update” feature (ala Firefox) that will let you update your blog through a single button click when you log in to your admin section.

After the keynote, the first session I went to was titled: Blogworld Workshop – Smart Ways to Monetize Your Blog. The first speaker was Jeremy Schoemaker (shoemoney.com). My only complaint about Jeremy’s session was that it wasn’t long enough. He’s a “Been-There-Done-That” guy who doesn’t pull punches. He comes right out and says “Adsense sucks for blogs” (which isn’t Earth shattering news, but you sorta expect people to not throw stones at Goliath). He went on to talk about leveraging ad networks and direct ad sales in order to boost your income. Since he only had 15-20 minutes, the information wasn’t overly in-depth, but would definitely provide a springboard to get you headed in the right direction. Hey Jeremy, next year I want a full hour from ya!

Another unfortunate part of this first session was that Brian Clark (copyblogger.com) came down with the flu and was unable to make it.

There were two other speakers during this first session – Asaaf Henkin (kontera.com) and Rebecca Weeks (DevineCaroline.com). While both individuals were certainly good speakers, their content didn’t thrill me. Asaaf spoke for 20 minutes about his company and their product (which is a revenue generator for bloggers, I’ll agree) and Rebecca spoke for 20 minutes about her company’s website and it’s growth this year. To me, both presentations felt like a long-form commercial for a product/site rather than giving me information about how I, as a part-time blogger, can earn money with my blog. I would have rather ran in to both of these people on the exhibit room floor.

After lunch I went to the Good to Great: Blogging & Profit Potential session hosted by Jim Kukral (jimkukral.com). Jim’s session is lean and mean. I can sum it for you with the content of one of his slides called “The Super Secret Sauce”. It says: Targeted Niche + High Quality Content That Solves Problems + Good Ad Placement = Profit.

Yeah, I over-simplified it just a touch, but I’m sure Jim would agree, master that and the rest will fall in place.

Jim also talked about how to use YouTube video content as the springboard for great profits. He had some fascinating info about how Tim Carter over at AskTheBuilder.com is blowing away the competition (or lack of) by creating video “How-Tos” for his site.

Then, in taking a break from the marketing track, I sat in on the Yamaha Motor Corporate Blogging Case Study hosted by Maggie Smith (SocialMediaGroup.ca). One of my key reasons for attending the BlogWorldExpo was to come up with ideas on how to help my company (the one I work for during the day) leverage the power of a blog and/or social media outlets to strengthen our relationships with people and companies we do business with. When I saw the case study was on a company the size of Yamaha, I quickly realized that they would have many of the same problems I expect we are going to face. Legal departments and marketing departments who both want to control the messages being put out are just two of the key hurdles I see in front of me.

Maggie provided a ton of information in under 45 minutes and had me taking notes like a madman. We were left with enough time for a decent amount of Q&A. The audience, though smaller than the “Make Money” sessions, pumped out some in-depth questions. Maggie was equal to the task with more great information.

I’m looking forward to writing up a proposal for my company in the next couple weeks. I’ll definitely be bringing a bunch of information from this session.

For my final session of the day, I was originally scheduled for Making Money with Affiliate Programs but, at the last minute saw New Media Revenue Opportunities with YouTube, Second Life, Podcasting and more!, which sounded quite interesting. The show has a kiosk that lets you change your session registration in the matter of a few seconds (literally), so I did.

After a quick technical issue, we were informed that the original speaker had to cancel and we would now be lead by Jason Van Orden (jasonvanorden.com). This was, by far, my favorite session of the day. I must have taken 3 full pages of notes. To try and give you an idea of the information Jason had to share, here are some of the notes I took that I think sum it up:

- Your audience wants: to be informed, to be entertained, and, to belong (i.e. opportunity to associate with other like-minded individuals)
- By producing good content you gain Thought Leadership
- Repurpose your content as merchandise (i.e. subscriptions, CDs, DVDs)

Again, I’ve oversimplified for the sake of creating some brevity (too late, I know), but one thing was clear, the battle will be won and lost with the quality of your content. Those who produce crappy content are going to fail in the long run.

After the show was over for the day, I headed over to the Hard Rock Casino for a WordPress Meet-up. There were roughly 20 people there including some of of the developers of WordPress and Matt Mullenweg. I got a chance to chat with Matt for a few minutes so I asked him the question that I knew was on the tips of everybody’s tounge… “What’s in the future for BBPress? As it turns out, the answer is “quite a lot”. They have hired a genius programmer to work on it full time. It will be moving more towards a simplified theme/plugin model like WordPress itself. The core of BBPress, he says, is actually better than that of WordPress. He called it a “Slow cooked meal”, referring to the fact that it’s been around almost as long as WordPress but hasn’t gained nearly the attention or cult-like following that WordPress has.

I’m glad I thought twice before deciding to skip the WordPress Meet-up. It’s not often you get to sit down and have the attention of both the founding developer and one of the current lead developers of a software program that currently has 1.7 million installs. I’d be understating it quite a bit to just say that I had an enjoyable time…

I didn’t take a lot of photos at the show today, but here are a few I snapped off: