DISQUS

Thanks for entering Corvida. A great sincere post! I hope we get to meet in Austin.

Wow Angie that was great!

The bill is popular simply because Obama is popular and the MSM has not properly scrutinized it. The problem is Obama didn’t write this bill, Nancy Pelosi and her fellow idiots did. If Obama had I am guessing it would be a better bill.

Now that the GOP has unanimously opposed it the MSM will cover it more thoroughly, how thoroughly is yet to be seen but I am pretty sure the more people know about this bill the less popular it will be.

This was a political move by the GOP but for once the politics and the peoples best interest are in line here.

Good to see you come around Robert. Something else that might interest you, I attended Affiliate Summit the day after CES (Gary V keynoted and kicked ass yet again of course). Both their exhibit space sales and attendance were up significantly. It was their largest show ever.

Which goes to my point that more than anything tradeshows are a reflection of their industry.

And to Williams comment above, the ratio of quality buyers at any given tradeshow always goes up in a down economy. The looky loos stay home but the buyers always show up. Thats why unless your company is broke pulling out of a tradeshow in a down economy is just plain stupid.

It is absolutely the best time to steal market share from your competitors and when the economy rebounds you are in the best competitive position with a new larger piece of the new bigger pie.

congrats guys! Looking forward to seeing you all in Vegas for CES.

See this is why you should blog more Robert. At first glance Techfuga looks really cool. I will be checking it out. On the other hand, you could have just tweeted that =p.

You forgot to mention something else you gained from spending so much time on Twitter and FriendFeed Robert....

You were featured in this very funny video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALbH63Ali9U

Well you made part two anyway =p

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwGzdbLweUI

In all seriousness I think you are both right. Spend just a little less time on twitter and a little more time on your blog and your video blogging.

You forgot to mention something else you gained from spending so much time on Twitter and FriendFeed Robert....

You were featured in this very funny video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALbH63Ali9U

In all seriousness I think you are both right. Spend just a little less time on twitter and a little more time on your blog and your video blogging.

I luv windows live writer!

You know I think you are very smart Robert but in this case you simply do not know what you are a talking about. I would love to have a one on one chat with you about the value of tradeshows (I have been involved with some very big events). The internet and social media is not killing tradeshows. In fact they make tradeshows bigger, better and even more important.

Until this economic downturn tradeshows on average were growing not shrinking. When the economy comes back tradeshows and other face to face mediums will be as strong as ever.

As for Apple dropping out. I would love to talk to you about that as well. I am sure they had their own reasons and money was most likely a part of that equation but Apple is a very poor example to use vs. normal companies. They have long proved themselves to be for Apple and only Apple. For some reason lots of fanboys think that's great. I don't.

Tradeshows are not meant for consumers, or hobbyists. They are meant for professional buyers, sellers and press. They are the pulse of each industry they represent. Big companies, small companies, new technologies, industry trends and so much more. MacWorld is really more of a consumer show / tradeshow hybrid.

CES is a great example of a tradeshow and a very well run, and very high ROI event. If you ask any exhibitor on their tradeshow floor I would wager 8 out of 10 will tell you they got their moneys worth and it is a must attend event for them. They are huge because they are a great association, have a great team running their event but more than anything they are a reflection of their industry and I think Gary would agree with that. The consumer electronics industry is huge covering almost every aspect of our lives and businesses and it has been booming for several years now.

If you like I would love spending some time walking a show floor with you and comparing the way you walk a tradeshow floor vs the way I do it. What you see vs. what I see, and what you look for vs. what I look for.

As a salesperson I can tell you that I find tradeshows to be the single most effective sales tool I have ever used and offer the highest ROI of any sales process. In fact industry data backs my own personal experience up.

I will sign so folks can take my perspective with a grain of salt but I have attended, exhibited and organized litterally hundreds of events.


Rick Calvert
CEO & Co-founder
BlogWorld & New Media Expo

Correct me if I am wrong Loic but you and Mike were and remain good friends correct?

As a fellow conference organizer I can assure you, you will never have the "right mix" of speakers according to some.

One more thing I meant to add. Very few people realize what a struggle it is to get good internet service at any conference center. Techcrunch had challenges, Web 2.0 had challenges and I know we have them as well. It is a constant fight to provide quality internet service for our attendees. If people only knew how hard you fight for them they would appreciate it much more.

Keep your head up Loic. It looks like most folks had a great time and I wish I could have been there. Dave M is absolutely right. It can be a thankless job sometimes but you are providing a very valuable service to our industry. Please keep it up and I will definitely be there next year!

Thanks for the post Mark and kind words. We are all really excited about this.

Does anyone else find it funny that the people who professed the virtues of the long tail, the knowledge of crowds and how the blogosphere was revolutionary exactly because of it's "conversational" approach vs. the one sided broadcast media's style are the first to revert to all the bad habits of traditional media?

Maybe they never believed in all that community stuff in the first place.

If you are a real blog you allow comments, and you link to other blogs you like, blogs you dislike, blogs you agree with and blogs you disagree with not to mention MSM sites.

If you are a "media company" you link to yourself and do everything you can to avoid sending eyeballs to your competitors.

There is nothing wrong with internal linking. You just aren't a blogger if you aren't linking out.

I agree with you almost completely Fred. I would just emphasize something that you touched on in your post. Your primary goal with your blog is not to make money and yet you still make $30k a year. This is not your primary occupation or source of income and you still make $30k a year off of it?. That is pretty substantial and impressive.


Do you factor in the deal flow you receive based on positioning yourself as a very social media savy VC via your blog?

I think once you do that in your case you will exponentially exceed that $75k a month number.

Lastly if you were to review your blog with a few experts who do blog with the express purpose of making money like Darren Rowse, John Chow, Wendy Piersall, Shoemoney, etc I would be willing to wager you could easily increase the income you earn via your blog with their recommendations.

Thank you for the link and the post Tim. Can't wait to hear your talk with Mike Shinoda! See you later this week in Vegas.

Rick Calvert
CEO & Co-founder
BlogWorld & New Media Expo

Thank you for the linky love Chris. Glenda is a Rock Star of the blogosphere and we are very glad she is able to join us again this year!

Congratulations to Eric and Dawn! Very nice people who deserve their success. Very nice of him to mention they met Technorati at BlogWorld last year.

Great post Chris. I certainly have a vision and an opinion on where this is all going. I could be completely wrong.

First of all you have to believe that blogging, podcasting, internet radio and TV all equate to newspapers, magazines, radio and television all being reinvented at the same time.

That's not all new media is, but that is a very large part of it. People are for the first time in history able to start their own media outlet / brand as either a hobby, or a business for free or very close to free using services like blogger, blogtalk radio, WordPress, YouTube and hundreds of others.

I think something you and many other "techcentric" folks are overlooking that everyone of the events you mentioned save BlogWorld are all built to appeal to the same group, or even niche's within the same group of people.

The mostly techy / geek set. Using the most conservative numbers there are 30 million fairly serious bloggers out there. Very few of them have ever heard of these events and will never find them when they do a google search because that is not what they are looking for.

Most of them are not techies. They use the technology but have a very limited knowledge of how a blog works, let alone internet TV. They want to learn how to improve their content, build their audience, and quite a few of them have built audiences completely by accident and are thinking about how to monetize it. They have never heard of events like Adtech or Affiliate Summit. (Great events btw).

While BlogWorld certainly attracts some of the usual suspects from the tech crowd, our strength and our goal is to serve the casual and novice blogger, podcaster, etc.

I have said this many times, I feel the future is a big tent event, with tens of thousands of attendees. That is what we are trying to build BlogWorld to be.

Its a little bit NAB crossed with ComicCon. A heavy dose of how to education and business oriented sessions with a lot of socializing with friends, peers, and Rock Stars of the medium's.

I do agree there is a place for many of the other events out there and lots of them will thrive because they serve their communities, but at the end of the day, most of us belong to a larger community of the blogosphere. And we all have common goals and needs in common no matter what we blog about.

Its late, I'm tired and rambling.

Blog on!
Rick Calvert
CEO & Co-founder
BlogWorld & New Media Expo

good job jim. well not really but you get an E for effort!

thanks for the link and the kind words Alex. Looking forward to seeing you in Vegas and enjoying a cold beverage or two!

Great post Whitney and great conversation in the comments.

I wish Jory, Elisa, and Lisa the founders of BlogHer would weigh in here. Maybe they have somewhere else and I can't find it?

Speaking as a white man, a blogger, and a blogging conference organizer ( I am the founder and CEO of BlogWorld & New Media Expo) I found BlogHer to be fantastic!

It felt to me like community of bloggers who just happened to be women and that it had grown organically. This was a group of people who had a lot in common, had built strong relationships online and wanted to get together in person.

Jory, Elisa and Lisa saw the need for that face to face connection and the business opportunity and created a great event that as an outsider looking in seemed to fill that need quite well.

We have "community tracks" at BlogWorld as well. Not by gender or race but by topic. We have tracks for sports bloggers, political bloggers, milbloggers and godbloggers. This year a group of real estate bloggers has organized a track. Communities are great no matter what their common interest/s may be.

Make no mistake BlogHer is a business. Sponsors like GM, Michelin, Intuit, HP, and Nintendo are evidence of that. To them the demographic represented at BlogHer is a very important one and their attendees influence buying decisions. I see nothing wrong with that either.

Yes they discussed female specific issues, most of the attendees were women probably 90%+ but I never felt intimidated or uncomfortable being there.

I did take my leave from the closing party at Macys when they moved to the Lingerie dept. But more than anything a "shopping party" just doesn't do it for me as a guy.

I think you nailed it on your response to Stephanie; Whitney, Women like her, and generations before her have made it possible for you to feel exactly the way you do and that is a testament to their hard work and sacrifice.

Two BlogHer stories to close. Opening night during a party at the hotel I had to visit the rest room. I walked past the ladies room and entered the next one. I realized when I came out, it had been converted to a ladies room as well during the conference. Thankfully no one else was using it at the time.

Someone I know attended one of the sessions where the topic was black female bloggers. One of the panelists stated at the beginning of the talk that if you weren't black, or a woman you might want to leave the room.

/ramble off

Fantastic post Andrew! I just had a conversation with someone about this over the weekend.

Of course we believe a lot of new media / social media companies would be well served by exhibiting / sponsoring BlogWorld which is not an overly "early adopter" crowd but a social media crowd. These are folks who want solutions to help them create, distribute and monetize their content and who have never heard of Techcrunch.

so how many out of those 10 do you need to make the internet famous mark?