I had the opportunity to meet with Stephen O'Grady of Redmonk today. Stephen was in O-town for Lotusphere. We connected at Orlando Airport (MCO) before he flew out.

It was nice to put a face with a blog. Great guy, very laid back and keen on the future applications of RSS and other tools such as Flickr and del.icio.us.

After the customary, 'So what exactly do you do?' exchange we discussed how tools such as Flickr allow the consumer and businesses to finally 'get' blogging. The ability to quickly combine words with photos is a powerful thing. There are numerous benefits for PR firms to be able to quickly provide commentary and photos of an event, all very easily via blogs and Flickr.

Stephen commented that previous to Flickr if he wanted to include a photo in his blog he had to worry about cropping it, uploading it, then inserting the correct HTML. With Flickr, it's an easy solution.

Blogging solutions and Flickr are fast becoming the grassroots CMS and a driving force behind a number of movements (i.e. citizen's journalism).

I told Stephen about a conversation I had with a student after my seminar yesterday. The student inquired about how to easily include photos on a blog or web page. He said he had won the Maxim magazine Super Bowl trip and an invite to the Maxim Super Bowl Party. He planned to take his camera phone with him and wanted to be able to share photos with his friends. Flickr is the solution.

Another topic was the current revenue model for the majority of blogging related services, i.e. PubSub, FeedBurner, Flickr. We think the majority of business bloggers would be willing to pay for these services if the price point was correct.

We didn't have a great deal of time, but it was a great conversation.