BlogWorld: Take One

BlogWorld is not for the geek at heart. I knew this in advance but hoped to find a little geek here and there. No such luck. Most of the vendors weren’t even up on the technology of their products. Companies that could answer all my questions was lijit, TalkShoe, b5media, AOL developer, and Windows Live Writer. They knew what they were talking about and I was even impressed by Windows Live Writer. I left the AOL booth psyched about their APIs and open development projects. Must have been impressive to make me turn around on the spot and take interest. More on that later though after I have time to test it all out…

Blogging ethics had a pretty good panel but I didn’t stick around for all of the money making seminars. This is a total schmoozing event. I need some schmoozing skills because mine are seriously lacking. What I want to learn is how to genuinely build a community and support my audience. I am also looking for tips on the technology behind it. WordPress, Blogger, MovableType, Vox…. they are all absent. It’s not about “the” blog at this convention.

I met the folks at the Lijit booth and those are some of the most enthusiastic ladies I have ever met. They were a ton of fun. In case you have never seen it, Lijit is a widget that you can embed on your blog that allows searching through your other sites, social network, and link backs. It tracks stats on your traffic and searches. I have it embedded at linuxchic.net and on my Facebook. I have found it to be the most useful widget I have ever used.

I spoke to Dave Nelson from TalkShoe about linux compatibility and he showed me how to get the client working in linux. He also mentioned there will be a web browser client coming out in the next few months. I will work on getting the client up and running on linux and hopefully this will allow us to produce some live shows with listener interaction. This is a very exciting possibility since I have been looking at how to produce through TalkShoe!

Tonight is the opening reception at The Joint at the Hard Rock and the Weblog Awards (tweeting it live so follow me on Twitter). Tomorrow is last day of seminars and the conference. I will keep you posted on what you are missing.