First BlogWorld Conference a Mixed Bag

Monetizers, famous people, and a pair of comfy PJs

By Shelly Brisbin

Las Vegas played host to the first full-on trade show/conference for bloggers of all genres. BlogWorld Expo brought an estimated 1,600 attendees and some 100 vendors together to discuss hot blogging genres like politics and milblogging, and hosted a handful of keynote speakers who blog famously, and others who were famous before their blogs.

In one of those “he said/she said” arguments that was not made more transparent because blogs were involved, advertised panelist Michael Arrington did not speak at BlogWorld, saying his participation had not been confirmed. His appearance had been heavily promoted. BlogWorld organizer Rick Calvert ultimately took the blame for miscommunication with Arrington. Meanwhile, Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington was another last-minute no-show, citing scheduling conflicts, while Om Malik, who had been scheduled to be on the panel with Arrington, stayed home with a bad back.

Attendees did get to hear from Mark Cuban, Leo Laporte, Matt Mullenweg, and Michael Medved, among others, as well as a heavy-hitting roster of cor­porate bloggers, political pundits, and marketing gurus.

On the show floor, traffic seemed sparse at times, often coinciding with popular sessions. And some vendors complained of slow or expensive Inter­net access in the convention center. Many of the vendors hawked blog adver­tising networks and monetization tools, while others sought to recruit new blog­gers, or to promote services like GimpTV, Utterz, and Yahoo.

Perhaps because this was the first incarnation of BlogWorld, it was a bit difficult to identify a zeitgeist for the show. Organized social gatherings were less prevalent than is typically the case at similar events, and it’s safe to say that while bloggers who knew others working in the same genre tended to congregate, the community aspect of BlogWorld still has a way to go. There did seem to be a large number of people and companies intent on monetizing blogs, or telling others how to do it. Some of the salespeople and authors had blog-specific marketing advice on offer, while some were attempting to convert general-purpose marketing theories into offerings that addressed bloggers.

At the annual Weblog Awards, presented during a pajama patty at the Hard Rock Hotel (cosponsored by BlogWorld and Pajamas Media), top vote getters in categories ranging from Best Individual Blogger (InstaPundit’s Glenn Reynolds won) to Best Music Blog (Stereogum.com) were honored. Other winners included RealClearPolitics for Best Political Coverage; Jammie Wearing Fool, Best New Blog; Above the Law, Best Law Blog; Joe My God, Best GLBT Blog; and This Week in Tech, for Best Podcast. Announcement of the winning blog in the Gadget Blog category was delayed for a time because Weblog Awards orga­nizers were looking into alleged voting irregularities. Engadget was declared the winter. For a full list of award winners, go to 2007.weblogawards.org.

PodCamp Marks One Year of Unconferencing with Changes in Course

By Shelly Brisbin

The actual one-year anniversary of the PodCamp unconference occurred in late September, but PodCamp Boston 2, held October 27 and 28, marked the movement’s “spiritual” anniversary, and seems to have signaled a time of reassessment by its leaders.

Last year’s Boston PodCamp, the first of nearly 25 that have been held around the US, and in several other countries in the year since, was a rootsy, DIY affair, held in a community college building. PodCamp Boston 2, on the other hand, took up residence in the sprawling Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, wel­coming double the number at the first event (but half the expected 1,400 attendees) to the cavernous space. Sessions were planned in advance, and sponsors gave demos in the hallways outside the session rooms.

The changing size and shape of PodCamp brought about the weekend’s most sur­prising happening, the repeal by founders Chris Penn and Chris Brogan of one of the seven rules the two wrote before the first PodCamp, to define what an event must be in order to call itself a PodCamp. The former Rule 4 stated that all events must be free to attend.

Brogan and Penn point out that organizers of future PodCamps do not have to charge admission or other fees, but say that dropping the rule gives flexibility for those who don’t want to be beholden to sponsors, or who want to insulate their events against the high no-show rates experienced in Boston.

While Boston PodCampers were listening to presentations by Julien Smith, Mark Blevis, Whitney Hoffman, and C.C. Chapman, Australian campers were descending on Perth, for that country’s first PodCamp. The following week, PodCampAZ attracted an enthusiastic crowd, and speakers including Justine Ezarik of iJustine.tv, and Ask a Ninja’s Kent Nichols. Podtrepeneur Evo Terra talked about podiobook publishing, and Clintus McGintus held forth on video blogging.

FeedBurner Integrates AdSense with Feeds

By Shelly Brisbin

The first fruits of the Google acquisition of FeedBurner are available to bloggers and podcasters who use the service. With a quick click, you can integrate AdSense into your feed. When you activate AdSense within your FeedBurner account, you have the option to choose a 300×250 or 468×60 text or image ad block.

The FeedBurner blog offered details: “The ad will appear below the first item on your site and archive pages once you have installed the necessary code.”

Current FeedBurner Ad Network users can add AdSense, in which case AdSense items will appear only when no FeedBurner ads are available. Non-ad-network mem­bers who use FeedBurner can also integrate AdSense into their feeds.

Splashpress Media Acquires Bloggy Network Blogs

By Shelly Brisbin

Adding to its 100 existing offerings, Splashpress Media (www.splashpress.com) has acquired five well-known blogs from Bloggy Network. Terms of the sale were not disclosed.

The new Splashpress blogs are:

» Blogging Pro (www.bloggingpro.com) is a blog for serious bloggers, which covers both news and technical aspects of blogging.

» Forever Geek (www.forevergeek.com) is a collaborative geek blog whose tagline is: “nerds are for dorks.”

» Celebrific (www.celebrific.com) is pretty much what it sounds like: a blog cover­ing celebrity gossip and events, and featuring star photos.

» Filmsy (www.filmsy.com) is a wide-ranging film commentary and review site, featuring both current and classic movies.

» bFeedMe (www.bfeedme.com) is a food blog with recipes, reviews of restaurants, and general food information.

As part of the deal, Bloggy Network’s director of communications, David Peralty, has joined Splashpress Media.

Utterz Simplifies Audio

Microblogging

Utterz didn’t launch its audio microb­logging platform at BlogWorld Expo, but the show provided a perfect showcase for the new tool, which debuted in Sep­tember with some well-known bloggers seeding the site with posts. The company, whose cow-themed branding makes some (like us) laugh, and some cringe, also showed off enhancements to the two-month old service at BlogWorld.

Using a cell phone, you can post audio messages (Utterz) to the service’s site, and/or to a Twitter account or blog. You can also follow other Utterz users’ posts: Utterz users can listen to their contacts’ Utterz, or all submissions via their phones, and even reply with text or audio.

Using Utterz Connections, you can tell Utterz to post your messages to blogs using WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal TypePad, and Tumblr. Uttered blog posts feature a flash player, and allow viewers to play an Utter in their browsers, or even download an MP3. Subscribers to your Utterz-enabled blog can receive Utterz as audio enclo­sures when you add Utterz as a widget.

The company was in fast-update mode in early November. The Utterz blog showed an almost daily string of updates, including support for tagging of Utterz posts, and plans to allow selective posting to multiple blogs on the same platform. For example you could send an Utter to your personal blog and another to your business blog, while a third could be delivered to both.

Utterz is free, and the company says it eventually hopes to pay the bills by offering premium services. You can get an Utterz account at www.utterz.com.

Free Speech and Facebook

By Elisa M Welch

Political blogger and self-described “reasonable conservative” Jon Swift (not his real name) attempted to log in to his Facebook account recent­ly only to find himself on the outs. The reason: his use of a pseudonym. “Fake accounts are a violation of our Terms of Use,” read Facebook’s email to Swift. “Facebook requires users to provide their real first and last names. Impersonating anyone or anything is prohibited. Unfortunately, we will not be able to reactivate this account for any reason. This decision is final.”

To be fair, Facebook has established a reputation for the authenticity of its users’ identities. However, Swift was, to employ a bit of understatement, perturbed. He wrote in his personal blog jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/11/facebook-declares-war-on-blogosphere.html “Would Bob Dylan be banned if he didn’t sign up as Robert Zimmerman? Would someone searching for their friend Carlos the Jackal have to know that his ‘real name’ is Ilich Ramírez Sánchez? Would Malcolm X have had to sign up under his slave name if he were still alive? Would Eric Arthur Blair have been banned from joining Facebook under the name George Orwell if he weren’t dead, too? Or is Orwell actually alive and well and running Facebook?”

Fierce debate ensued, including support from A-list bloggers such as Robert Scoble, Dennis Howlett, and Stan Shroeder. Users created a group named “Let Jon Swift Back into Facebook.”

The result? Facebook relented: “Since others on the site seem to know you by this name, and since you don’t appear to be using the name to impersonate or to hide your identity, we have determined that you are not violating these Terms. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.”

Score one for free speech, at least in the form of satirical pseudonymic writing.

CLIQ for Bloggers

Hanging out with the cool kids, and maybe making some money too, is as sim­ple as adding CLIQ to your blog. At lease that’s how StepChange, the company that built the new blog monetization system, hopes it will work.

Bloggers using the CLIQ widget promoter other bloggers in their clique, and receive promotion in return from bloggers posting on similar topics. CLIQ users control which posts are featured, and can track which posts within their group are achieving the best results. Clique members share revenue generated by the widget’s recommendations. Find more information at www.cliqin.com.

Automatic Plans WordPress Theme Marketplace

Automatic Media, developer of WordPress, announced WordPress Theme Market­place in November. The store, hosted by Automatic, and available to bloggers with wordpress.com blogs, will allow developers to upload original, link-free, GPL-compli­ant themes for sale. Automatic will take a reported 50 percent of the proceeds from each sale.

Automatic founder Matt Mullenweg wrote on his blog that the themes would have to meet quality standards, as well as the basic technical ones. Because of the GPL requirement, marketplace themes will be available free to wordpress.org users.

In another example of blog-based cross-pollination, it’s worth noting that we first heard about the Theme Marketplace on Read/Write Web (www.readwriteweb.com), which got the news from a Twitter post, and a Spanish-to-English translation of a report about Mullenweg’s WordCamp Argentina presentation, where the mar­ketplace plan was unveiled.

Zune Directory Opens

Microsoft’s Zune Marketplace podcasting directory began accepting submissions in November, in order to seed the directory for the Zune 2 launch on November 13.

To submit a podcast, producers must download Zune Marketplace software for Windows. Microsoft says a Mac option will be available, but no timeframe has been set for that option, which would likely be accessible via the Web.

Zune users can browse or search the Marketplace directory to find podcasts, or they can use a personal podcast feed to add shows of their choosing.

Learn more at www.zune.net.

New Blog System for Neighbors 2

WebCrossing offers a new blog system within its private-label social network system, Neighbors 2. The new system provides group blogs, and sports com­pletely redesigned personal blogs with a new WYSIWYG editor. The new system was made automatically available in mid October, with no installation required, on all WebCrossing Neighbors networks.

Group administrators can activate blogs for their group members with one click in the Group Settings panel. The Group Blog feature lets private groups use blogs for group news and updates. Public groups can allow entry posting by group administrators only, by qualifying group members only, or by any system member. Group administrators can also designate who can add comments to blog entries.

The new system archives entries auto­matically by month and by year. Complete tagging capabilities let members categorize their posts for easy retrieval. RSS support is available for blogs in publicly available spaces. A new Related Links feature allows authors to add supplemental URLs for information associated with the blog entry. The new Blog system supplants the simpler Journal system, and automatically retains the Journal archive.

WebCrossing Neighbors is available immediately as a server hosted package for maximum uptime, priced based on traffic and member storage capacity, starting at $195/month. For more information visit webcrossing.com/Home/webcrossing_neighbors.htm.

Bloggers Unite to Do Good

Social network BlogCatalog (BlogCatalog.com) will launch its fourth social awareness campaign on December 17. This Bloggers Unite campaign challenges its more than 80,000 members and other bloggers to do something good offline — an act of kindness — and then post about it, using words, pic­tures, and/or videos to tell the story.

In previous campaigns, Bloggers Unite raised money for students across the US via the Omidyar-supported DonorsChoose.org; significantly increased organ-donation awareness; and prompted more than 10,000 bloggers to call for an end to abuse.

Bloggers Unite does not specify which nonprofit organizations will benefit. Instead, the organization will solicit and coordinate companies that will pledge a donation to the blogger and/or to the charity of the blogger’s choice. Prizes will be awarded to bloggers based on their posts, pictures, or videos.

Preeso Premium Podcasting

SubscribeCast Technologies announces the release of a Web-based premium podcast­ing application: Preeso is a redesign of SubscribeCast’s first premium podcasting application, which currently is the backbone for paid podcasts including Mysterious Uni­verse (mysteriousuniverse.org) and the Ed Schultz Radio Show (bigeddieradio.com).

Podcasters who sign up for Preeso can host their media on any server they choose: Yahoo, Libsyn, AOL, and so on. Preeso is also server-OS independent. Once Preeso knows where your media is located, it creates and manages RSS feeds for subscribers. When the application senses abuse, such as a sub­scriber attempting to share his or her feed, it responds automatically in a variety of customizable ways, including sending email to the abuser, or shutting off the RSS feed.

The application hides the original Web location of the delivered media, so sub­scribers cannot use their old RSS feeds to mine the URL and access media after their subscriptions have ended. For pricing and further details, visit www.preeso.com.

A New Way to Comment

The intriguingly named Intense Debate (intensedebate.com) has launched a public beta release of its blog-comment­ing plug-in.

Intense Debate Comments are embed­ded into a user’s blog like widgets. Users can set up profiles to include easy access to their social networking pages. They can also follow comments across other blogs from specific users, through RSS feeds. Basic stats, on both commenters and publishers, are available, and users can arrange for threaded comments to keep track of the conversation.

Bloglines Rankings

Bloglines is the latest site to offer blog rankings to its readers. The Bloglines Top 1000 is still a beta feature. The listings include the most popular sites among users who subscribe to RSS feeds via Bloglines. The list is updated each Monday evening, and includes current position, +/- positions, and a graph showing rankings over time for each entry.

Bloglines says ranking blogs by the number of users who subscribe with Bloglines has created a list that includes more than the “usual suspect” tech and mainstream news sites. The most surpris­ing top ten blog in mid-November was The Shifted Librarian, a blog for librarians transitioning to the digital age. Tech blogs including Slashdot and Wire Top Stories also appear in the top ten, along with mainstream news sites from the BBC and CNN. The Bloglines Top 1000 is at beta.bloglines.com/topfeeds.

SharedBook Updates Blog Printing Tools

SharedBook released the latest version of its Blog2Print widget. Blog2Print, which allows Blogger users to turn blog posts into printed hardback or paperback books, offers enhanced photo and text-wrapping capabilities. SharedBook also provides com­merce tools to let bloggers share in revenue from the sale of their books. The bloggers’ share is 20 percent of the sale price.

SharedBook provides an open API for Blog2Print, and recently demonstrated its use with AllRecipes.com. Members of the recipe site can publish cookbooks for sale, using the customized version of Blog2Print called Create-A-Cookbook. Details at blog.sharedbook.com.