Announcement

Karen Klein (no relation to me) interviewed him for a business advice column about getting started with a business blog.

We’ve taken our Sessions page live, and we’re working to populate it with conference sessions.

We’re in the process of developing a plugin that will place the sessions in the schedule grid, but for now, you can see them as blog posts. And because they’re blog posts, they have comments. So please, please give us lots of feedback.

And if you’re interested in being updated when we add sessions, you can subscribe to our sessions RSS feed.

We’re presenting to an in-office group today about blogging for business. We do this for companies. Right now, Steve is talking about subscribing to RSS feeds.

If you’re interested in having an in-office presentation about business blogging, drop us a line!

Our valued genius, Jason Preston turns a ripe old twenty-something today.

Happy birthday, buddy!

Business Week online columnist Karen E. Klein interviewed me a short time ago asking for advice for one of her readers about starting a lifestyle blog.

It was a really interesting question and I enjoyed answering it. Many thanks to Karen for getting in touch and for fitting in a plug for our conference this September.

The next person to register for our October September conference gets a free hour of consulting with me during one of the conference lunch periods.

I’ll announce the winner here!

Many thanks to Easton Ellsworth of Business Blog Wire for posting one of our conference bugs on the sidebar of his blog.

And don’t worry buddy, I’m still working on the Fortune 500 wiki. I just get so overloaded…

We’ve got some beautiful sidebar bugs, and we’d just love it if you’d spread the word by placing one in the sidebar of your blog.

First person to post one and e-mail me with the link to your blog gets some link love and a big hug from me the next time I see you!

<a href="http://www.blogbusinesssummit.com/conferences" title="Blog Business<br /> Summit 2007"><img src="http://www.blogbusinesssummit.com/images/2007bugs/BBSChicagoGeneral.gif" alt="Blog Business Summit Chicago 2007" width="160" height="160" /></a><br />

<a href="http://www.blogbusinesssummit.com/conferences" title="I’m attending Blog Business Summit 2007"><img src="http://blogbusinesssummit.com/images/2007bugs/BBSChicagoAttendee.gif" alt="Blog Business Summit Chicago 2007" width="160" height="160" /></a><br />

<a href="http://www.blogbusinesssummit.com/conferences" title="I’m speaking at Blog Business Summit 2007"><img src="http://blogbusinesssummit.com/images/2007bugs/BBSChicagoSpeaker.gif" alt="Blog Business Summit Chicago 2007" width="160" height="160" /></a><br />

<a href="http://www.blogbusinesssummit.com/conferences" title="We’re sponsoring Blog Business Summit 2007"><img src="http://blogbusinesssummit.com/images/2007bugs/BBSChicagoSponsor.gif" alt="Blog Business Summit Chicago 2007" width="160" height="160" /></a><br />

Since this site is brand new, and we want to make everything work nicely, we want to identify any broken links. If you e-mail me with information about a broken link and your username on Twitter, I’ll send you a TwitterKiss.

The first TwitterKiss went to Chris Pirillo for IDing the broken link in the clients section of our sidebar.

And if you don’t know what a TwitterKiss is, you haven’t lived.

As you can see from the sidebar of our blog, and from our confirmed speakers page, Motorola’s Executive Vice President and CTO Padmasree Warrior will be speaking at the Blog Business Summit this September.

I must confess that since I came across Padmasree’s blog earlier this year, she’s become one of my heroes. Under her direction, Motorola won the 2004 National Medal of Technology.

She’s also been a passionate advocate for federal research and development funding to keep the United States competitive in the world economy. She recently wrote:

For example as outlined in a report on competitiveness from AeA, consider how federally funded R&D accelerated innovations like fiber optics and the Internet. Federal funding of solid-state physics and ceramics/glass engineering in the late 1960s created the knowledge base for widespread use of fiber optic cable in the 1990s. Department of Defense began experimenting with the design of a decentralized file and data-sharing network in 1969, leading to the explosive diffusion of the Internet 25 years later. The fact is that government R&D investments play an indispensable role in building the foundation of a knowledge-economy by investing in concepts years before they are commercially viable.

To top it all off, Padmasree is an advocate for women in an industry that, as Robert Scoble so aptly put it, has a “culture of attacking women that has especially got to stop.”

For all of these reasons and more, I think Padmasree Warrior is the bees knees and I’m jumping for joy that she’ll be joining us this September.

What a week it’s been! I thought we were going to be live with this blog by Friday, but a number of unanticipated issues cropped up. We’re now fully propagated and live again.

I’ll be spending a lot of today re-building the tag cloud and tying up loose ends with the site migration. Right now, I’m sitting here with Steve and Kim working on yet another (!) proposal and discussing the editorial for our upcoming conference.

The big new kid on the scene while we’ve been out of commission is Justin.TV. Justin Kan — who happens to be a childhood friend of mine — walks around with a camera on his head. Twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week. He says he’s going to do it, “until it stops being fun.” I would have reached that point about five days ago, but it’s been nine days and Justin’s still going strong.

The pace of social media has really picked up of late. I posted about this on my personal blog. Basically, between Twitter and Justin’s project, the streams of content are coming at us faster than ever before.

I’ll be spending a lot of the remaining week delving into the relevance of these emerging online phenomena to our business audience.

Welcome to our new WordPress-based blog. We’ve been geeking around all week with CSS and PHP and MySQL to bring you this fabulous new online property without compromising RSS feeds, permalinks or anything else.

I’ll be in and out of a deep, geeky bunker this week. Part of this bunker involves major changes that are forthcoming to this site. Stay tuned for all the excitement.

You’ve been telling us for years that we need to take the Blog Business Summit eastward. And we’ve responded. We’re very excited to announce that the next Blog Business Summit will take place this September in Chicago, IL:

Monday, September 17 through Wednesday September 19, 2007
Chicago City Centre Hotel and Sports Club
300 East Ohio Street
Chicago, IL 60611
312-787-6100

We’ll be posting room information later this week and registration early next week. Editorial will start going up as we secure speakers. This conference is goign to be amazing. I hope to see you all there!

I love that Matt Mullenweg and his crew over at WP opted to name the latest version of Wordpress after all-time awesome chanteuse Ella Fitzgerald. I’m also pretty damn happy with the way Ella is working on my personal blog. It seems a lot faster and more efficient. I’m particularly jazzed about the feature that allows you to “set any ‘page’ to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.

So if you’re interested in upgrading your blog to 2.1, but you’re nervous to take WP apart and put it back together all by yourself, ping me. We can upgrade you to 2.1 for (most sites) around $200.

Every month Fast Company’s Michael A. Prospero writes a column called “Best Blogs.” He looks around to find the three best blogs in any given category. This month, the category was “Blogging the Bloggers” and he picked us along with Greg Knoltenberg’s Bloggers Blog and Kyle Bunch’s Blogebrity as the winners.

Of our blog, Prospero wrote:

The Skinny: An expert guide for every company that has tried to promote itself online via word-of-mouth — but that ultimately can’t fathom this new-fangled blogging thing. The overriding theme: “Businesses are used to a level of control that is no longer possible, and that’s scary. The sooner you get over that paralyzing fear, the better.”

Obviously, we’re honored to be considered among the best blogs and being quoted in Fast Company is always a thrill. So I asked Prospero how he chooses the final three.

“As you might imagine, picking three blogs from the plethora of choices every month takes a little doing,” he wrote. “It’s a very rigorous, scientific process that involves a supercomputer, a massive database, recursive algorithms, and, most importantly, a hat to pick the names out of.”

Then he got serious. “I’ll pick a topic for the month, say social networking, and then scour the Internet for a bunch of blogs that examine that topic from a variety of angles, but all ideally with a business bent to them. After I’ve come up with a critical mass, I’ll choose the final three based on how well they fit together—we don’t want to feature three blogs approaching the same topic from the same place—to give our readers a well-rounded perspective.”

But regardless of how he picks them, we are thrilled that he chose us.

Prospero is always on the lookout for good blogs, so if you know of one, you can click here to reach him.

We got back from CES with blistered feet but smiling faces, and after a weekend of recuperation we’re already back in the ring for next year.

We were so pleased with the results from our 2007 “It Won’t Stay in Vegas” party that we’re already planning another year. Our goal this time around is to invite every qualified blogger at CES. If you’re interested in sponsoring, click here. If you’re interested in being on the guest list click here.

Thanks to everyone who made the 2007 party such a smashing success!

I promised I’d do one yesterday, but the minute I got home I fell in to a coma and didn’t awake until 10 a.m. this morning. The general consensus among everyone we’ve talked to is that they should rename CES, the Sleep Deprivation Convention.

At any rate, here’s a rundown of some of the awesome buzz from around the blogosphere. This isn’t anywhere near comprehensive, so if you posted about the party and your post isn’t included here, I’m sorry. Please leave it in the comments and I’ll add it to the list post-haste.

• Windows Live QnA covers the party and has some great photos from the Bloghaus to boot.
• Jeremiah Owyang also has some great photos, including a really great one of Maryam.
• Our favorite Sidebar Geek Brandon LeBlanc has a great rundown of the party.
• Paul Mooney has some great coverage of the new Monster Cable blog.
• The Bubblicious Gang has a great lineup of photos. I really look forward to seeing their video coverage.
• An Earthling has some awesome photos of Steve doing magic.
• Renee Blodgett has a rundown of all the awesome women of CES.

As most of you know PRWeb is a frequent sponsor of our conferences. When I met Joe Beaulaurier at the last conference, I had to gush about just how helpful PRWeb had been.

Also joining us for the party is Monster Cable, which makes many different kinds of high quality consumer electronics. They’re just getting into home automation, which is something I used to wish for as a kid. I used to wander around the house saying, “computer: tea, earl grey, hot,” but nothing would happen. It was most depressing.

I wonder if they could make my smart house talk to me in Majel Barrett’s voice.

Update 4:52 p.m. Brad Bramy of Monster has asked me to add that they’ll be giving out tickets to their Tuesday night George Benson concert at our party. The concert will take place after the party is over…

It is with a heavy heart that I post that a true blogosphere hero has passed away. George Budabin was the father of one of my favorite bloggers, Andru Edwards of GearLive.

I met Andru at the last conference. He is a man of remarkable character and integrity, traits whose development he credits to his father. The entire blogosphere owes George a debt of gratitude for raising a son who has contributed so much to our community.

Andru is working to build a tribute to his father in the blogosphere by asking his bloggy friends to link to his remarkable post and also to the George Budabin tag on Technorati. I have done both here and would like to encourage you to do the same.