We all know the power of Google. This session was about how you can use search engines to your advantage and how to tailor your blog to get the most out of search engine results.

Tim Stanley of Justia.com did a really outstanding job of reviewing how the search engines work and what techniques do and don’t work for increasing your results. What I found best about this session was that it wasn’t about “tricking” search engines into getting good results: it was about consistency in your posting methods, site structure and design, and increasing your profile in the blawg/blog community.

Of all the sessions I’ve attended today, this has had the best depth of material. Although, the next session I’m attending is on tagging, and I’m keenly interested in that!

Well, perhaps my reputation precedes me… and that may or may not be a good thing! But I have met several people who have noted, “Oh, you’re Dave!”

This session was given by Matt Homann and was about building your reputation on-line with your blog. The most interesting things to come out of this session were that building your blogging reputation happens outside of your blog.

Matt had some really great ideas about how to incorporate good ol’ fashioned networking into blog reputation building: call up people who’s blogs you like and introduce yourself. Take the conversation analog, because this is about connections with people. One of my favorite suggestions (which he gave credit to someone else for, but I missed her name) is the “unreasonable demand”.

This is a great, great concept! Each week, come up with five unreasonable demands: things that it would be great if they happened, but that you have no expectations for actually happening. Then ask. Let the person know that you are making an unreasonable demand and that you don’t expect it to be filled. You’d be surprised how often people shock you and grant your request anyway!

On the technical, blogging side, Matt mentioned tagging blog entries. This is something I have not done yet, but I definitely intend to start. I’m a nut for Flickr and del.icio.us, so it seems a really natural extension of the blog.

It’s no secret that I would like to launch a Podcast. I’ve got everything set up and ready to… so what’s stopping me? Time. The “producer” in me just won’t let me “just do it”. I have to fuss and fret over production values. Oh, well.

This session was a great intro to Podcasting. Good information about utilizing and planning for Podcasts; the best thing I took away was the importance of “Show Notes” to make it easy to find your Podcast. Because audio files aren’t searchable (yet–get on that, Google) the notes that accompany your show are essential for getting the word out and letting people search to find your Podcast.

There are many issues which were only touched on briefly that I would like to see explored more: what are the licensing mechanisms and issues for using original music in your Podcast. What are the issues about licensing the content of your Podcast?

The first session at BlawgThink 2005 just wrapped. It was “Advanced RSS” with Rick Klau from FeedBurner. Overall, it was a pretty interesting session. Some of the topics we addressed were extending RSS, security issues/providing secure feeds, and touched on the dreaded “monetizing” blogs.

It wasn’t as “advanced” as I’d hoped, but given that I’ve written several books on XML, that wasn’t too surprising. I also disliked that Rick made editing RSS on your own seem “frightening”. XML is text. It has a few rules, but they are pretty easy, certainly not out of reach for most users–that aspect could have been handled better. It was an advanced session, after all. But Rick was very straight up, answered questions, and I did come away with a better outlook toward FeedBurner than I had going in. I think I’m going to give it a whirl.
Note to self for future sessions/open sessions: Seth Godin’s “Monetize This“.