On Sept. 27, the BlogOrlando unconference drew more than 230 participants from across central Florida (especially Orlando and Daytona Beach), plus a contingent from Tampa — and some from as far away as Atlanta and Washington, D.C. This event brought together people interested in blogging, podcasting, public relations, social media, citizen journalism and other topics. While bloggers were the main audience, online community staff from some legacy media organizations attended — including the Orlando Sentinel and the Daytona Beach News-Journal’s MyTopiaCafe.com (which I manage).
According to organizer Josh Hallett of Hyku, this event attracts a diverse crowd. While the publishing toolsets unify the attendees, bloggers vary greatly in how and why they use these tools.
I used Twitter to provide live coverage of the opening session by Ant’s Eye View’s “chief ant wrangler” Jake McGee on how the Lego Corporation revitalized its brand using the adult fan base of this toy. McGee referenced the 1999 classic The Cluetrain Manifesto when discussing the broader transformations taking place in business because of the Internet. The mainfesto’s “95 theses” are a must-read for anyone operating a business today — especially media organizations. Bottom line: Your customers are not weird, stupid, or fanatical. Don’t try to push them from Point A to Point B online. Rather, move them toward a “higher calling” with rich interaction, engagement, and emotional attachment to your brand and company.
A few takeaways from Frank Gruber’s (of Somewhat Frank) session on Shiny New Objects:
- Online file storage and sharing.MyDropBin is powered by Amazon’s S3 storage, so you pay pennies for storage.
- Lifestreaming. Think of FriendFeed as a lifestream that includes a social recommendation service. Also, Addictomatic lets you plumb all of the social sites at once and create a customized page.
- Content Discovery. To control information overload, FiltrBox lets you create alerts and recommendations in one monitoring hub. You can set up filters with granular alerts.
- Feed Readers,FeedHub gathers RSS feeds into one place and bubbles up information based on clickstream recommendations. You can also create memes (topics within feeds).
- Video. For online video editing online, Eyespot is Gruber’s latest pick. Also, Animoto lets you pull together video and photos to create a video montage with music.
- Blogging platforms. While WordPress was mentioned, Gruber focused on microblogging tool Tumblr for on-the-go lifestream blogging.
- Photo sharing. Services such as Flickr and Picasa are familiar to many, but FotoNauts lets you create mashups of other users’ photos. This service is still in private beta, so you need an invitation to play.
