Live Blogging Blog World Expo
08:44
-First thing huge number of Bloggers and No Power Strips
-Keynote area is going to be standing room only
08:54
-Matt from WordPress is is rehashing how WordPress got started I am not sure why a bunch of bloggers need to be told about the wordpress history are we not all bloggers and supposed to know this stuff.
-18 WordPress Staff support a 100 million impressions across there hosted solutions I wonder how many servers it takes to run that.
09:14
-BlogWorldExpo needs a back channel lots of bloggers but I am not seeing tweets or many blog post.
-Matt says get your User Model before you get your business model While I do not agree a 100% their is a need to make sure that when you are launching a web property you need to think about the users.
-Political Blogger wanted to know how to monetize, the short answer start planning two years in advance. But a side discussion has broken out on the ethics and disclosure of those political blogging and the harm it could cause to the blogging space.
10:00
Attending the Corporate & CEO Blogging session
-Corporate number 1 fear is that the corporation will criticized and that they will loose control. They also are worried about the amount of time it is going to take away from their staff to support the blog
-Kodak Rep is talking about their corporate blog and one of the things that surprised me is that they post their customers comments largely un-edited.
-HP Policy on Corporate Blogging is that the each group or person within the company can have a HP blog but their has to be a marketing or way to interact with the various groups in the specific technical industry.
-The corporate blogging session is somewhat a sleeper
-Southwest Airlines bloggers say blogging is a huge commitment, but it has been a huge media bonus for them. They are using their bloggers as conduits into the press. The goal with the blogs were the way to reach their customers and have used the blogs as a way to get focus group feedback. They talk about their handling of the Mini-Skirt issue and say that they did not do a good job. But they said they learned some lessons from that event and
-Southwest, Moderates their comments but they don’t allow personal attacks and or customer service issues. Most surprising that they also moderate all topic post. Thus they completely moderate the entire site. They have PR and Senior people looking at each post. Thus they are controlling the conversation in a big way.
From a personal perspective I cannot imagine controlling the conversation this way. While it looks like they are trying to be fair, I am not so sure that I would like having to go through corporate PR for each and every post. I wonder if this is really blogging this is more like PR controlled spin masters.
Show Floor
No Lunch visited with Vendors. The show floor has a fair number of vendors lost of ad companies. Think I made the folks at Kontarea made when I told then inline advertising is evil and users hate the pop ups piss people off
Lots of vendors and had some great discussions. There are a number of Affiliate marketers here as well along with a lot of vendors that are pushing services for bloggers.
13:30
Attending the Secrets of great video production and Vlogging
-Sorry this session is for beginners a true 100 level presentation. The Presenter is using some purple background death by power point that is boring and hard to read.
-Lots of information being put out in this session and the presenter is all over the place. Death by Power Point in this one.
-Why do presenters continue to make people think that they have to have Feedburner it really drives me crazy.
2:45
Monetization of Podcast
-Well I am not sure why I am sitting through this, but it is always nice to listen to other companies ideas.
-Be a Podcast Consultant thats the first thing that has been covered
-Jason VanOrden is pimping tele-seminars and webinars. Sounds like Network Marketing and something I would buy on late night TV
-Nice Mention with of Talkshoe/Blubrry partnership and also a nice mention from the folks at Podango very gracious
-Non Tangible rewards like swag and products to review.
-Some discussion about the need for sponsorship disclosure and through product mentions. The main point is you need to be honest and disclose. Do not be afraid to tell your audience you need to get paid for the art.
-A show got a six figure grant not a sponsorship from a pharma company.
-Recommendation from the panel to join a network and let those companies running networks to find sponsors for their podcast.
-One problem I am seeing with a discussion here, is that they think ad insertion and being able to rebuild the shows on the fly is king. But the problem is 95% of shows do not have a long tail. Thus 95% of the shows out there have no reason to use technology that rebuilds the show.
-Podcaster should have a Newsletter period.
-Steve Boyett claims his podcast does 40TB a month in traffic? Interesting
-John Havens says the landscape is changing and that things that were once free will soon no longer be free. But the problem with that is most people don’t want to pay for anything and a generation has grown up not having had to pay for anything.