Announcement

One of our favorite online communities is the group of gadget heads that gather at CES every year to blog and geek out. We love them so much that we throw them a party every year. Here’s some video footage of this year’s event:

Full coverage of the event can be found here. Special thanks to our sponsors:

We’re very excited to announce that our friends at Virgin America airlines will be handing out 80 free round trip tickets anywhere they fly. For you online community geeks, this might be interesting because of Virgin America’s nifty seat-to-seat communications tool.

So if you’re at CES and you’ll be around tomorrow night, drop my colleague Jason a line at jason [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com, include the URL of your blog and let him know that you’d like to join us.

Unfortunately, it looks like this site is a magnet for spammers and hackers. I guess we’ll never understand why they’re all so interested in business blogging (ha hyuk).

One kind reader shot us a screencap from our feed - apparently it’s propagating something about viagra, percentages, and possibly African finance deals. We’re very sorry about this.

We’re taking a look at it now, and if we can’t figure out how it got there, we can at least buy all the viagra stock so they’ll stop bugging you about it. Regardless, it should be out of your way shortly. Thanks for bearing with us!

We realize there’s been some wonkiness going on with the BBS site recently.

We’re working on de-wonking the site right now, and we hope to have a return to the usual wonk-free experience in the near future.

Thanks for bearing with us.

We realize there’s been some wonkiness going on with the BBS site recently. We’re working on de-wonking the site right now, and we hope to have a return to the usual wonk-free experience in the near future. Thanks for bearing with us.

Our friends at Newstex are going to be manning a booth at the upcoming BlogWorld & New Media Expo which runs November 8-9, or if you’re doing the “E&E” track, from the 7th to the 9th.

While you’re there, be sure to check out Steve’s session, “How to Work with Blog Consultants,” and also swing by the Newstex booth.

Newstex is a service that syndicates blog content to companies around the world, and then shares the content royalties with the bloggers. They’re going to be demoing the service and hanging out on the floor at booth #405.

Aside from having good execution, the core concept behind what Newstex is doing is actually a really cool idea. Sometimes people forget, or just don’t realize, how much good, original content is produced every day in the blogosphere. It’s all valuable, either as product feedback or good analysis or just new information.

Pulling that together and finding an effective way to monetize it–and then sharing that revenue with the bloggers who are creating the content (I’m looking at you, splogs! Stop stealing our content!)…I’m glad that service exists.

Newstex is also running a contest to win a free iPod Nano (one of the new, “phat” ones). To enter, just sign your blog up for their content distribution system. (So let’s see…sign up to get money for your blog content, and maybe win an iPod? I’m looking for the down-side here).

A while ago we announced our sweet and useful BlogTips application for Facebook, which we decided to make into a contest for a free pass to the Blog Business Summit.

A few days ago we zeroed in on Mark Krupinski, who submitted a rather large number of extremely good tips. Things like, for example:

Participation: In addition to writing posts for your blog, you should spend a fair amount of time reading and commenting on other blogs. These can be your competitors or simply the thoughts of others in similar fields.

• This is very important for: understanding what’s going on right now in the blogosphere in relation to your topic, how others are using their blog to communicate and this will help you establish “link love” when you comment on other sites.
• Find other blogs via engines like Technorati or Google Blog Search. Then start subscribing to RSS feeds to the ones that interest you. As time goes on, you’ll realize the ones that are important to you and you keep those and start identifying the blogs that influence them.
• Remember to use blogrolls as a valuable resource for finding what the author subscribes to and follow the same path as above. It’s a simple meandering through the blogosphere.
• When you do comment, make sure you add to the conversation. Comments are like a cocktail party - You don’t just walk up to a conversation about the business potential of Twitter.com and start talking about what ate for dinner last night. Make it relevant.

For some very obvious reasons, we’ve offered him a free seat to the Web Community Forum 2007: Community Building in the age of Facebook instead, and he plans to be there.

Congratulations Mark on winning the contest, and we look forward to seeing you in Seattle this December!

I just went through our frighteningly huge queue of comments awaiting moderation (85% of which was spam, of course), but the other 15% were definitely real comments from real people.

I know that I, at least, rarely check back in places where I leave a comment unless something reminds me to do so—which is why I like follow up e-mails so much—but if any of you left a comment on one of our posts over the past, I don’t know, month maybe, and it didn’t show up, it’s probably there now.

Sorry for the delay!

I’ll be appearing as a guest on One By One Media’s show The Mediasphere today at noon PST.

Please join us and call in with your questions at (646) 478-5023.

After much consideration we’ve decided not to host the Blog Business Summit in Chicago this year.

We are contacting all of our speakers, sponsors, and attendees to notify each and every one of them personally of this news.

Despite strong participation from sponsors and our long-time community members, we just weren’t seeing the registrations we hoped for from the local, Chicago-area bloggers and PR/marketing professionals that were required to support the event.

Our conferences have always relied heavily on local participation, and our feeling is that Chicago has been very well served this year by at least two excellent, and very reasonably priced blogger conferences: SOBcon and BlogHer. A third event close on the heels of these other shows is obviously a tough sell. In addition, it’s clear from discussions with local marketers that blogging has normalized and is not the disruptive force it was back in 2004 when we launched the BBS.

As our pal Robert Scoble said in 2006, blogging is rapidly being subsumed under the larger heading of social media and online community/conversation building. For those serious marketers that “get it”, blogging is just one tool in their arsenal that needs to be mastered.

This is why we as a company are expanding our editorial gamut. The BBS team has launched a new blog: the Web Community Forum

And as you’ll see when you visit the Web Community Forum site we’ve created a new event focusing on the best practices for commercial and political ventures who want to use Facebook as a community building tool. Our sense is that many of the same people who attended our first three blogging conferences are now shifting their attention to building and engaging with their communities there. We hope to see many of your faces once again.

On the Web Community Forum site, we’ll cover how people, businesses, and political campaigns are using technologies such as Facebook, Twitter and, of course, blogs to reach out to core constituencies and build communities. We’ll talk about best practices and great technologies - from WordPress plugins to Facebook applications - that enable community engagement.

We ask for your patience and understanding as we move forward with the logistics of canceling this Chicago event. We are committed to providing excellent customer service to our entire community as we move forward.

If you’re a Chicago BBS speaker, attendee, or sponsor and have not heard from us by noon PST Tuesday. Please feel free to contact us. Here are our phone numbers:

Steve Broback - (425)-503-2093
Kim Larsen - (425)-556-1941
Teresa Valdez Klein - (206)-229-9335
Jason Preston - (206)-235-8981

Jim Turner of One By One Media — which is sponsoring the Blog Business Summit — wrote some really nice things about us today. I couldn’t resist linking in.

I’ll be appearing on One By One’s BlogTalkRadio show next week Tuesday at noon PST.

Today’s guest is Jeremiah Owyang, one of my favorite people and a great resource for everything you need to know about online community building. You should absolutely tune in to listen to today’s discussion at 12 noon PST.

Steve and I are about to go into another webinar about reading RSS feeds. If you’re looking for a primer on what this feed reading stuff is all about and how it can help you monitor for mentions of your business online, tune in at 10:00 PST.

If you’ll be around at Gnomedex in Seattle today, please be sure to swing by and say hello. If you’re curious what I look like here’s a really unflattering photo of me.

On this day in 1776, the wise people of the American Colonies declared themselves independent from the British Crown. By doing so, they set in motion a series of events that leads us to this grand moment in the evolution of human communication.

Now, it’s true that the Constitution as we know it wasn’t framed until 1789 and that the Bill of Rights wasn’t even included in the original document. But the Declaration of Independence foreshadows the Bill of Rights with its reference to “certain unalienable Rights” beyond the “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” originally mentioned.

When the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791, the first of the ten amendments to the Constitution guaranteed that, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Two hundred and sixteen years later, this specific articulation of an idea only broadly referred to in the Declaration of Independence guarantees us the right to speak the truth on our blogs and in our lives. Without the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the blogosphere could not exist.

So amid your fireworks and barbecues and times of good cheer today, please do take a moment to think about all that our nation’s founders accomplished when they pledged to one another, “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

We at the Blog Business Summit say to you, “God Bless you and God Bless America.”

Happy Fourth of July!

We all know that Facebook is rocking socks. Even Robert Scoble says that he would choose it over Twitter if he had to be on only one service.

I’ve been playing with the site as a way to connect with college friends for years now, but it’s moved beyond a simple “keep in touch” mechanism.

So I built a Blog Business Summit group on Facebook. I even created a Blog Business Summit event on Facebook.

So if you like this blog, or you’re coming to the conference, or you’re just a geek and you love talking about the intersection of technology and business, you should come join our group. And while you’re at it friend me, and friend Steve, and friend Jason and friend Kim.

If you’re a blogger and you have two minutes (seriously!) to take a survey about your information gathering habits, we’ll be eternally grateful. So grateful, in fact, that we’ll enter you in a drawing for a $200 discounted attendance to the Blog Business Summit this September.

Sound good? Click here to take the survey!

We’ve been spending a lot of time recently on developing the roster of sessions and speakers for our upcoming conference in Chicago. This happens to be one of my favorite parts of working with the Blog Business Summit because it gives me the opportunity to review experts, ideas and best practices from all over the emerging field of business blogging.

This year, we’re working to bring more corporate speakers than ever before to the podium. Big corporations have a great deal to gain by blogging, but they also have a long way to fall if their initiatives are not well-crafted. In order to give our corporate attendees the information they need, we are drawing speakers from the growing pool of corporations who are blogging and engaging with bloggers successfully.

And while successful business blogging remains the primary focus of our conference, the Blog Business Summit is about more than blogs. New media for online communication are emerging all the time, and we know that our attendees want to be on top of those trends as well. This year’s conference will take a look at emergence of online social networks as powerful media properties in their own right. Understanding how these networks function and how users respond to commercial engagement with their communities is just as important as understanding the rules of successful corporate blogging and blogger engagement.

Another new horizon in our editorial development process has been the launch of our session submission and review system. A lot of successful conferences in the technology space take on an “unconference” model. That is, the attendees shape the editorial and direct how the conference forms. We think this is an interesting idea, but we run a conference that is primarily targeted at the business community.

We started asking ourselves, “how do we adapt our business-oriented conference to a more democratic model without sacrificing hard-hitting business oriented editorial?” We decided to put our money where our mouths are. After all, we’re always talking about listening to community when it comes to product development.

So we worked with our team of geeks to develop a massive custom WordPress plugin that would allow us to make blog posts the fundamental unit of editorial. In short, one blog post = one conference session. The plugin allows us to provide additional meta-data to each post (time, location, editorial track, speakers, etc.).

The plugin also manages and reviews the ratings and proposal system. This allows anyone who is interested to submit a session for review, and to vote on proposed sessions. We think this hits the sweet spot between community participation and the top-down editorial model favored by most business conferences.

Stay tuned in the coming days for some very exciting session and speaker announcements. Sessions will appear right here on the blog (and in our RSS feed) as individual blog posts.

We’re happy to announce that after much tinkering and many adjustments to the massive plugin we’ve been talking about, we’re finally ready to call it a late beta.

Here’s what the plugin does:

• Allows community members to propose and vote on sessions and speakers for our conferences.
• Allows anyone to sign up to be a partner level sponsor of our conferences for free.
• Tracks clickthroughs and conference registrations to award additional sponsorship benefits to partner-level sponsors, or to allow sponsors who have written us checks to offset the cost of their sponsorships.

And yes, we did all this by working within WordPress.

So please do try the plugin out and either e-mail me or leave us a comment here with your feedback.

UPDATE: There seems to have been some confusion about the plugin’s availability. This is not something we developed to offer as a free download. It’s a behemoth custom conference management install with lots of site customization required. It’s for exclusive use here on BBS for the time being. Please give it a shot here on our site and let us know what you think.

We talk a lot around here about using technology to really listen to customers. In fact, that’s really what we teach people how to do. So we figured it was time we started practicing what we preach.

The bottom line is that some of our favorite sessions have been suggested to us by members of the BBS community before, after or during conferences. We wanted to streamline that process by making it easy for people to join our community and propose sessions. That’s why we built a plugin that lets our community propose sessions and rate other people’s sessions once they are proposed.

So have at it! Go hog wild! Propose a session or nineteen. We’re all ears.

UPDATE: Ok, OK! I spoke too soon. We detected an error in the plugin that required we shut it down for the time being. It should be up and running early next week. Sorry for the inconvenience.

We are in the midst of installing a massive plugin that will help us do some AMAZING things with conference editorial. Until everything is moved in, there may be some minor site glitches.

If you see anything serious, please drop me an e-mail. Any issues should be fixed by Friday.

Thanks!