Commentary by blog and social media consultant Josh Hallett on the use of blogs for public relations, media, marketing, communication & branding and from time-to-time the unsolicited opinion.
Last week I asked how many photos would be uploaded from BlogHer. Looking at the numbers exactly one week later it was 2,903 photos. If I look now it's 3,321. That's quite a few photos :-)
At some point the uploading from the event will stop, but who knows when. Each day a few hundred more photos are being uploaded. I'm going to put together a set of my favorite shots from the conference. What are yours?
The photo below is one of the most powerful images I think I've ever captured. It's a moment between Elizabeth Edwards and Jen Lemen. Jen was sharing a personal story with Mrs. Edwards. They spoke for quite a long time and as you can see there is a tremendous amount of emotion there.
One of the best 'booths' at BlogHer this year was Scrapblog. Carlos, Alex, Cindy and the rest of the gang offered hands-on demo of their product and a great photo opp for BlogHer attendees. Bloghers had a number of props and costumes available to 'dress up' and have a Scrapblog made.
During the event I heard a number of women talking about the booth and organizing group shots.
From a social media standpoint, Scrapblog has been uploading all the images created to Flickr and will be doing some follow-up features after the event.
I'm in the closing keynote session at BlogHer '07. It's a room full of hundreds of women bloggers talking to Elizabeth Edwards.
It's interesting to watch the ongoing Twitter coverage of Elizabeth Edward's closing keynote at BlogHer '07. Almost all the tweets I see are micro-coverage of the Q&A. It's really cool to see the use of Twitter in this way.
One of the afternoon sessions at BlogHer '07 features a teenager speaking about professional blogging. What's funny is that I know her father. Small world.
Chloe Spencer will be speaking about her Neopets web site called Neopets Fanatic. Her dad is Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts.
At BlogOrlando we also have a teenager speaking, Judson Collier. When I first put Judson on the speakers list I got an e-mail from somebody saying "He's just a teenager." My response, "Yes I know, and he probably knows more about the subject than you, so you should listen."
I have a few live-blog gigs coming up so I'm not going to burn myself out blogging, so I'm focussing on photography. However there are plenty of other folks live-blogging. You can check out:
- Amber
- Rusty (one of the men here)
- Aliza
- Marrijean
I'll be adding more as I find them.
Terri Theurer from Yahoo spoke about some of the technical things you can do to optimize your blog. Yahoo saw that almost 60% of their visitors are arriving with an empty cache. That is they are loading all elements of the page from the web server, not their local cache. There was a thought that with the increase of broadband use that the browsing experience would be faster, but it's sometimes the opposite. Designers are developing heavier pages, combine this with an empty cache and you have long load times.
The other thing to think about is mobile users, they need an extremely fast download.
(Disclosure: Yahoo is a client, I have done design and development work for them)
BlogHer '07 is kicking off this morning in Chicago. Jory, Elisa and Lisa are on stage doing the opening announcements. My photos will be here, and there is a photo group here.
This is the third year of the conference and things have grown quite a bit. The question I have though is how many of the audience are women bloggers and how many are PR folks looking to 'reach' women blogger? Talking to a number of folks it seems the PR factor is a bit higher this year.
Last year I noted that the BlogHer conference generated over 2200 photos on Flickr, I wonder how many will be taken/uploaded this year in Chicago? 3000? 4000? 5000?
As a baseline, I did this search. It shows 5,982 results as of 11:00 PM on Tuesday night before the conference. I'll do a search again on Tuesday after the conference.
Update: I did the same search at 11:00 PM this Tuesday and got 8.885. Doing that math that's 2,903 photos from the event. I think if I give it a few more days we'll easily crack 3,000.
BlogHer starts later this week in Chicago. I head up on Thursday and am really looking forward to it. In my recent travels around the country I've met quite a few people that are heading to BlogHer as well. I'm looking forward to catching up with old friends and meeting some new ones.
Last year's event was great, but it will be interesting to see if there is a different vibe away from California. I don't think so, but we'll see.
Are you going to BlogHer? I'm organizing a dinner for either Thursday or Saturday night.
Registration for BlogHer 2007 is now open! I just grabbed my ticket....you should too. My flight is booked and so is my hotel :-)
Can you tell I am excited about BlogHer? Like I've said before it's one of my 'must' events. Are you going?
This is a tough call, because it depends on what you do for a living. The three best *paid* events I went to last year were:
- New Communications Forum
- Gnomedex
- BlogHer
I make the distinction of paid events since there is a bit more of an investment in going to a paid event rather than a local un-conference-type event.
For the past few months I have told anybody I work with in PR that they need to go to New Communications Forum this year. The event is being held March 7-9 in Las Vegas at the Venetian.
All the sessions are great and feature some of the most well-known folks in the PR/social media movement (including some guy named Josh). Like any conference though, the best interaction is during the breaks and dinners...with such a great line-up of folks on hand it's hard not to get something out of it.
The only downside? Deciding between some really great sessions that end up being scheduled opposite of each other.
e-mail: josh@hyku.com
skype: jrhallett
mobile: 863-258-7338
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