Today I attended the Six Apart Blogging seminar in San Francisco. It was just for an afternoon, but there was some interesting information intermingled with some usual sales stuff. The room was a bit packed and the time flew by. I think the people in the room were a bit too diverse. They ranged from the non-technical to the techy nerds, from the non-commercial to the big buck hitters where money talks. My thoughts are that the session was very MT bias, the attendees were too wide spread in sales and technical knowledge and their expectations from the sessions were wildly different.

Six Apart said that they eventually scoop up every feed to gauge feedback on these types of sessions. If you read this guys, it needs to be longer and more specific and focus on either technology or commercial aspects. There needs to be a more detail agenda published beforehand.

Six Apart touched on new features in the new Movable Type version due in Q106. Some of these sound exciting and useful:

• Cloning of blogs: if you have a good blog, layout and styles, you’ll be able to use that as a basis for another
• LDAP authorisation: this will be great for giving permissions across an organisation and delegating authoring

An interesting speaker was DL Byron who is now evangelizing standards-based design and is the co-author of Publish & Prosper: Blogging for Your Business (Peachpit Press ISBN 0-321-39538-7)

He gave an amazing story on how he was made redundant during the dot com bust and started Clip n’ Seal with other fellow web guys. Clip n’ Seal (a bag device that seals to keep thing fresh) had a marketing budget of less than zero, but had a web presence in the shape of a blog. Once the blog got established, they found it was an effective marketing tool. Passively they began to be contacted by Amazon and Nasa to name a few. Other companies were figuring out how to apply new uses for the product. With so many websites out there, the blog tended to raise the product through the rankings much more effectively.

http://www.clipnseal.com/blog.htm

Some interesting take-aways from today:

• The blog life-cycle is Inform, Influence and Inspire
• If you use blogs in a commercial way, just talk about what you do best and what you do, don’t preach and sell
• Think about your potential audience and author accordingly. Should your voice be an “email voice”, “corporate voice”, “personal voice”, etc? Most importantly, blog your own way
• Get your blog linked to other blogs, get that blog to link back to yours. Reciprocal arrangements favour you and search engines such as Google love it
• There are some new ways RSS is being generated. For example, the store Target are now creating tailored RSS feeds for customers by ZIP code. You enter where you live and your RSS is always locally relevant
• The most popular podcasts are religious ones, or “Godcasts”
• Advantages of RSS feeds is that they are 100% opt-in and anonymous, persistent in their connection to others and that they are reliable delivery mechanisms that do not produce inbox “clutter”
• If you have a consumer facing blog on your corporate website with multiple authors, ensure you have a corporate blogging policy just as you have a web use policy
• Make your blog easy to subscribe to. This can be done with My Yahoo or Google home page add icons, or new browsers such as IE7 and Mozilla will take care of this automatically
• Not all people like to read RSS pages, give the option of an email subscriber box on the same page of your style sheet
• The big challenge in the near future is how can RSS user subscriptions be tracked? What metrics can be formed?
• If you write corporate blogs, add your blog address to your email signature to drive traffic and promote your blog
• Targeted ads have been proven not too work too well in RSS feeds as users are in “read” not “purchase” mode

http://www.sixapart.com/