9:00am – Free breakfast always tastes better doesn’t it? I’m sitting at the front most table at BlogPhiladelphia in the Grand Ballroom at the Radisson-Warwick Plaza hotel. Call me the teacher’s pet, but I wanted a good seat.
You can watch my twitter and my flickr for updates throughout the day as well.
Update: Dave Parmet pointed out that there is an official BlogPhiladelphia flickr group so please add all of your photos there.
9:30am – The introductions are complete. We had an introduction to "what an unconference is" for those in the room that have not been to one. And now the first session is beginning. For session information, see this page.
Update: The video of this session is now available.
Update: "I think being too serious can actually drive away readers." — Joey Sweeney.
Caroline Marks says that Ziddio sees users that end up getting tons of views on Ziddio but not on their own sites. I’m beginning to wonder if there will ever be a market for an open platform for video sharing that does not have a portal site attached to it? Would someone pay for something like that to subsidize that portal? Oh, and Ziddio has cats on their frontpage – must be that Web 3.0 thing.
@BlogPhiladelphia attendee: Students "practice medicine" in SecondLife. Awesome. Would you try to advertise, or network, for your company/blog in SecondLife? Have you? Personally I’m not against it because I’ve read many success stories involving the use of Second Life. I think you go to where the people are, you don’t decide where the people should be.
Request: Anyone in the room have an advil or aspirin or something? Please bring it up to the front table to the guy in the marroon Viddler shirt. I’ll buy ya an open source beer.
Emily King: (quoted loosely) "It takes about a week to get a post out." — Intelligent Travel. Is this "blogging" if it takes so long and is such a process? She says that she’s working hard to make that much quicker though, so keep pushing Emily!
The backchannels (blogs, twitter, etc) for BlogPhiladelphia must be working – because nearby bloggers are beginning to flock to BlogPhiladelphia. Come on down, and bring Aspirin.
Marisa, of ForkYouTV, hooked me up with some pills! Thanks so much Marisa!
Break time.
11:30am – In the Crystal Ballroom. About 60 people are in here, so far, to listen to the COO Dina Kaplan from Blip.tv. I’ll fill in the details as I have them.
She asked for a few examples of video blogs, one is called PhilaStories. Sounds interesting. She’s giving an overview of Blip and says the number one tip to building an audience is doing "regularly updated content".
Dina: "The average video blog length is 3-5 minutes." Setting a specific period of time for each show, and trying to live within that for each episode, will set the bar with viewers to expect a certain amount of time they’ll need to devote to watching it.
"You set the rate" regarding how much you should be able to get for sponsorship of your show. I thought it was amazing that she didn’t know ForkYou when they were mentioned when ForkYou uses Blip to host its raw video files while using Viddler’s flash player. I know Scott and Marisa. I heart ForkYou!
Attendee: "How do you address the questions of the media buyers like: How many rolls of toilet paper will we sell by sponsoring a video blog?" Trial and error. Faith. Instead of going gangbusters, do a trial period. If the results do not pan out, move on.
1:45pm – Lunch was very good. Cheese steaks! Looking forward to the afternoon’s sessions as well as my opportunity to demo Viddler!
Side note: Tonight there will be a sponsored event at a bar (Alex can you give details)? Please see Alex if you, or your company, can donate a few extra dollars towards the open bar. Thanks!
Update: Additional coverage of BlogPhiladelphia can be found everywhere. In podcast form at PhillyTip.com, and John Suder’s blog are two examples. Any others? Put them in the comments please. Oh, and of course – pay close attention to the blogphiladelphia tag on Viddler for video coverage of some of the sessions.
2:30pm – Don Bain from Electric Rain compares the 2d browsing experience with the 3d experience of Second Life. Tens of thousands of people are looking at the same page (Amazon.com) and you wouldn’t know it. In Second Life, you can be with other people looking at the same thing. The avatar is the "personalization". The person is the cursor. "Navigation" is actual movement. Excellent points.
Thomas Taylor told me that there is now a BlogPhiladelphia wiki so if you can help to document this conference, and don’t have a blog or would rather use this wiki, please do so!
Updating the next day: I was without my laptop for the last 6 hours or so, long story. So I am going to edit this entry even though its already Friday.
Scott McNulty lead a session at the end of the day talking about negative, or bad, comments left on a blog. Opinions about moderation ranged from "delete immediately" to "never delete" comments that are felt as being negative. What are your thoughts on negative comments? Keep them? Ditch them? Ignore them?
At the end of the day we had an OpenGrid where Allen Stern, of the tech blog CenterNetworks, was able to present PreRollr. PreRollr allows you to add ad overlays to videos on your site. Then I was able to do a presentation on Viddler which, went, not so well considering that I didn’t bring the right cabling to hook into the projector here. My boy John Billota came to the rescue with his computer though (thanks John!).
Afterwards the hotel Radisson’s Tavern 17 (I think) invited us down for free wine and food which was a great precursor to an after party at Triumph Brewing Company. Thanks to all that chipped in (I’ll get a full list from Alex and update) and letting us eat and drink for free until the bar closed.
