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Once in a while you hear things like blogs are passé or blogs are losing ground to new social media platforms such as micro-blogging like Technorati posted recently. Being addicted to blog reading, I had a hard time imagining such a thing and wanted to learn more about this perception.
This is the reason why I decided to attend the largest bloggers event in the world, named of course Blogworld Expo!
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This year the event took place in Las Vegas on the 15th to 17th of October and was attended by more than 1000 bloggers and social media professionals. This 3 days event featured many acclaimed speakers experienced in several fields related to online communication. Because most of the attendees were from USA I thought it would be a good opportunity to learn more about the American blogging environment and find out if there are big differences with the European one, which is very diverse.
First of all, though many thought leaders were present, I think we can safely say that the participants do not represent the general state of the American blogosphere; mostly because of the venue and the price tag. The majority was in attendance because of their professional backgrounds, and even if there were novice bloggers in attendance, they had a specific outline of their goals during their blogging time.
I attended several keynote presentations and must say that most of them were of very high quality and sometimes extremely funny and captivating. (Thank you Timothy Sykes!)
It is impressive to see the energy created by these bloggers. Even though the main subject of the event was blogging, most attendees were on their laptops or iPhones tweeting non-stop one idea or expression after the other. This was happening so much that I still can’t tell if Twitter is about broadcasting or interacting. Actually, the fact that Twitter was omnipresent during the event forced people to wonder if it was being misused. Because of this, a lot of buzz started regarding the state of the Blogosphere. This activity is growing rapidly; it’s is great news for the community!
Furthermore, I had the opportunity to meet the guys from Blogcatalog, a blog directory where the ZackBrandit team is quite active. Great guys by the way! I was really surprised to hear that 60% of their members are located outside of the USA.
To summarize, Blogworld was a cool and very well organized event. I discovered that monetization is a very strong theme for many bloggers (because more people are taking it to the professional level). There are blogs with millions of pageviews I’ve never heard of and mommy blogs (blogs written by mothers) that are very trendy.
I also received some great feedback regarding the ZackBrandit platform, concept and ideas for further development. With this I also want to share with you that we are only a few days away from our afilliation launch!
Stay tuned and let me know if you also had the opportunity to visit Blogworld or if you know other social media events to attend.
Take care.
