Blog Business Summit Wrap-up

It’s Monday and I’m back in New Orleans after spending the end of last week at the Blog Business Summit (BBS) in Seattle. First, I would highly recommend BBS for people who are thinking about blogging, or for those who have just started blogging. Overall, I didn’t find as much value as I would have liked, I had to dig for it, but it was there. The second day was much better for me than the first day because of Robert Scoble, John Battelle and the Future of Blogging panel (the last session of the conference with Elizabeth Lawley and Matt Mullenweg).

Scoble did a session with his wife titled, “10 Ways to a Killer Blog.” Nothing incredibly insightful here, but their presentation was interesting and organized. They did this whole newly-wed schtick that kept things lively. I’ll dig out my notes and post the 15 (he gave us 5 bonus) ways to a killer blog.

Battelle was great. I’ve seen him speak a few times before, and he brings so much energy and experience to his talks that you can’t help but hang on every word. He told us a lot about himself, and his company, Federated Media, but his most interesting stuff was when he analyzed the evolution of the Web.

I was completely tired by the end of the my second day at BBS, but since Mullenweg was speaking at the end, I decided to stick around. To my surprise, Elizabeth Lawley stole the show. She started her talk by proclaiming that she was a member of the intelligencia and not a tech head (although I beg to differ). The panel was about considering what’s to come in the future, and she had several examples of what she was betting on for the future. Her coolest example was from Microsoft and how they are designing special lenses for cell phones that can scan bar codes. A scanned bar code and the product that it’s associated with can then be searched using global positioning and price comparisons to find the nearest, best price.

In the end, like I said before, I would highly recommend BBS for people just getting started. For someone like me, who gets this whole blogging thing and went seeking concrete take-aways to bring back to my business, BBS may not have been for you this year. Like with all conferences, networking was good, and Seattle was a cool city. This conference could have been much better if they would have assigned moderators to the sessions. Too often, discussions devolved into conversations about the panelists and not the topic that the session title implied.