An excerpt, "In a nutshell, it’s my take that the exhibitors were a bit shortchanged and nickel-and-dimed, but that going to the conference was overall a good decision for us, and that I will go back next year… hopefully as a speaker, since we do offer a unique perspective on the future of personal web publishing. Anyway, it’s my suggestion that if conference staff wants to see any of the same exhibitors again, they should offer deep discounts in recognition of us propping up this first try. And also let me be clear: this first try was a success, even considering some headliners backed out. I just think that the people who propped it up should be recognized next year. I would also suggest that Las Vegas is a bad place for this. A better populated city would draw the ‘real users’ exhibitors are really looking for."

I like Vegas for this event as it seems to be a more social event and so coming to a "fun" city like Vegas makes sense. Though I absolutely understand Nate’s point in that if it was in NYC, tons more would have come for free expo passes. If we look at SXSW, which is also a social event, there is no expo hall.

It will be interesting to speak to some of the other exhibitors to see if they are in agreement with Nate’s comments.

This post will serve as the final recap for BlogWorldExpo 2007. Let’s first deal with the formalities: I didn’t win the millions so CN shall continue. I learned how to play roulette and won a few dollars but the slot machines killed me. Though Wheel of Fortune made me $50 from $10 which was cool. Craps – I stood there 30 minutes and still had no idea how this is played. Played two hands of blackjack, lost both and that was enough. And I won’t even start on the b5media poker table – lost all 10 hands I played. :)

A big thank you to Jeremy @ b5media for offering me the opportunity to speak at BWE. I look forward to more speaking engagements in 2008. His group of bloggers have such a family feel to them, it was great meeting so many. It’s nice to sit with bloggers who are outside tech and learn about the ways they monetize and build their traffic to what drives them to continue. 

Overall I enjoyed the conference and thought it was similar to SXSW. I was disappointed by Richard Jalichandra from Technorati. I think Justine did a good job as a replacement and I enjoyed meeting so many of the CN readers. The networking was top-notch!

Touching on the Arrington situation briefly. I posted so that anyone who was planning on attending the session would know that Om/Mike wouldn’t be there. The room was at the end and it might give someone a chance to stop and go to another room. As for the details, Andy Beard did some huge investigation and Mike has updated his post about what happened. I am not going to touch on what happened at this point but I absolutely disagree with Mike’s comments about speaking. Mike sees it as a "net negative" and will only speak at his friend’s conferences going forward. This is a mistake. So many want to meet Mike and it’s similar to coming to meet an author you like/have an interest in.

I also believe that his public appearances is a part of why Techcrunch became #1. To turn his back on this, I think is a mistake. Getting out to events for Mike might be a negative, but for his fans and for the conference organizers, I would suggest it’s a positive.

All BlogWorldExpo posts

• Day 1 Recap – b5media/speaking
• New Media Moguls Roundtable
• Exhibit Hall Photos
• Keynote Matt Mullenweg
• Schwag Giveaway Part II
• Schwag Giveaway

Conference concluded.

Update: Idiot Allen forgot to note the sizes before shipping the schwag box home. So once I get the shirts, i will let you know – I believe they are Large and smaller

Leo Laporte said that Om is sick and Mike "forgot". I was really looking forward to meeting Om. Hope you get better Om!

Update 10:00PM – Mike has responded – he says, "I never agreed to attend the conference."

CrispAds – Mints – 2 available

Kontera – Flying Disc

SnagIt – Stickers – 2 available

YieldBuild – Tshirt XL

Pens – CrispAds 2 available – Blogsvertise 1 available

Snap – Tin of Mints plus sticker

Southwest Airlines Peanuts – 2 available

Lijit Stickers – 2 available

Technorati Stickers – 2 available

Blogsmith – Cord Holders – 3 available

Yovia – SodaHead – Squishy Balls – 2 available

Izea (formerly Payperpost) Coozie

Right Media People

The panel included:

• Brad Hill – Weblogs
• Richard Jalichandra – Technorati
• Jeremy Wright – b5media
• Roger Simon – Pajamas Media
• Jason Shellen – The Secret Agency – moderator

What challenges do we face for blogging in the next couple of years?
Roger – Going forward with our advertising network – we believe the audience for blogs is very special – we have corresp. in 47 countries
Jeremy – we aren’t about the a-list, Web 2 bloggers – it’s more about moms.
Roger – we have 100 blogs and 50 corresp. that aren’t bloggers but that will report the news for us.
Brad – we got up to 90 and we began streamlining and now we have 35 most in english but a few in other languages.

What does the makeup of technorati look like now?
Richard – we are tracking 110 million blogs – it’s basically input the authority rank – and track the ones that have recency – most of the people in the room would probably be listed.

Where is Technorati going in the next 2 years?
We are becoming more of a discovery place – they want to find out other relevant blogs on a topic – really moving into search and discovery. And helping the exploration process with discovery.

Allen’s note – now all of a sudden Richard changes his tone from his blog post about only caring about the top100, now he cares about everyone.

Roger – what’s making blogging work is the passion of the bloggers.

What can new media learn from new media?
Richard – I was just doing a blogtalkradio interview and realizing that we haven’t indexed yet – referring to Twitter. For us,we have looked at bits of social media – about 300 of them out there – what we are really trying to do is stick with relevancy and recency. We have to focus on what are the most important things to the audience.

Jeremy – we are trying to extend past text in anyway we can.

Brad – we get a lot of our traffic through Digg.

session concluded.

ALL PHOTOS HERE

Opens with a few bad jokes

Matt speaks about his backstory – same thing we have heard 1k times, I am not going to repeat it.

Discusses Automattic – that he was trying to marry fiduciary responsibilities with social responsibilities. Two products Akismet and hosted Wordpress. 18 people on the team, 350 servers, 100 million global uniques in the last month.

How do you stretch 18 people to support that type of site? "a lot of caffeine" – if you are working on an assembly line – the best will have 2-3x productivity. with technology we look for 40x what a normal person would.

You should look for a topic that you find passion around. The key to finding success starts with great, passionate content.

How do social networks and bloggers fit in together? I am on 15 social networks and have crappy profiles on each one. I am never sure whether to friend someone or not. I feel like the best profile of me is my blog. I will go through a person’s blog archives if we are considering hiring them. Blogs need to become a larger part of profile pages.

Where is Wordpress going today? I think on the .org side there are 2 directions – on one hand it’s becoming a platform and where we can add more without making the core heavier is working well. The software is getting lighter but what you can do with it gets more. The soul of wordpress is the publishing and writing on the web and the tools save – but wordpress also sucks – there’s no offline actually, spell check sucks. The comment system is behind.

Companies and Web sites I deal with mostly are like a bad date – they don’t shut up.

Are you actively planning strategies on how to better monetize your products? I am a big believer in creative destruction. Capitalism is a working system. Google makes a lot of money but they also pay out a lot of money (allen: lol yea right). There are ways we could enable users to profit and still keep it users enabled.

Journalists have actual rules, I tend to trust bloggers more. He believes that the sponsored posts could really hurt the industry.

Unfortunately the speaker is out and I can barely make out what he is saying.

Session concluded.

I spent the day with the b5media crew – what a great bunch of people. There is a strong family feel to the group. All of the sessions were good and from speaking with the attendees, they obtained good value from each session. I would like to thank Jeremy Wright for giving me the opportunity to speak with him. It was great and I look forward to more speaking gigs in 2008 – would love to do a panel with Marshall and Jeremiah, that’d rock. And Om Malik – I will bring the NY’er out of him!

Tonight was the b5media party at the Luxor – top shelf all the way! Asian place with lots of food options. And I am not naming names but one of the people at my table was able to drink 12 year old rum from Guatemala.

Check out a full recap of the day’s discussions at After the Launch blogger Shama Hyder and About.com blogger Deborah Ng (though she spelled my name wrong!).

Check out my photos on Flickr.

Shannon Clark has been reporting on ad:tech in NYC and will continue through the balance of the week.

Rachel Clarke will be covering the Future of Web Design in NYC beginning tomorrow.

Till Klampaeckel is covering the NY Tech Meetup this evening which includes a presentation on Vimeo and Drop.io, two companies we covered in the past week.

Grab the RSS feed and be notified as soon as one of us posts new updates.

I am looking forward to seeing everyone in Vegas – you’ve got to attend my session – you never know what I might say :) Check out the full day of education and register for the event. The conference is three days (November 7-9) and is a great bargain with the awesome talent lineup.

Some other notes/questions:

• Anyone up for a blogger dinner in Vegas?
• I will be providing conference coverage for the balance of the conference
• I will be attending and covering Postiecon (the PayPerPost conference) the day after Blog World Expo

Drop me a line if you plan on attending either my session and/or the conference in general.