I took advantage of some personal travel to the Los Angeles area to also attend a seminar on the Essentials of Business Blogging at The Westin Hotel near LAX. The morning session focused on an overview of what blogs are and how a person can track the huge variety of blog postings that happen on the incredibe number of websites on the internet.
The morning sessions included:
- The Blog Advantage: What Blogs are and Why They are Taking Over
- RSS and Feeds: Monitoring the Blogosphere and the Buzz
- Building Your Blog: Features and Tools
Only the last session got bogged down in too many questions from the audience and not nearly enough content being presented by the speakers. It was a shame too since the third item was one that is of real interest to me.
It also became apparent that since the company Six Apart was heavily involved in the implementation of the event, an emphasis on their product Movable Type was to be expected (and occurred). Despite the product emphasis, the speakers provided some very useful comments on how blogs are being increasingly used in business and the growing ability of blogging engines (i.e. programs that people use to produce blogs) to produce full web content solutions that look and feel more like websites and less like chronologically-based web postings.
The afternoon session should be equally informative since we will be looking at promotion, success factors, and the “what’s next” for blogs. Once the session is done I will post another update.