That’s right Mark Cuban owner of the Dallas Mavericks, billionaire entrepreneur, founder of HDNet, and author of the popular Blog Maverick blog will be giving the closing keynote at BlogWorld & New Media Expo.

We hope you are as excited as we are to hear from one of the most influential bloggers in the world.

Mark’s talk at 4:15 on November 9th is a perfect ending to a star studded line up of speakers, including Leo Laporte, Mike Arrington from Techcrunch, Matt Mullenweg founding developer of WordPress, Hugh Hewitt author of Blog, Will Leitch of Deadspin, Glenn Reynolds the Instapundit, Jerome Armstrong from MYDD, Jeremaiah Owyang from Forrester Research, Matt Burden of BlackFive, Om Malik, Brian Clark from Copy Blogger, Jeremy Wright CEO of b5 media, John Hinderacker from Powerline Blog, Jeremy Shoemaker aka Shoemoney, Tyler Bleszinski president of Sports Blogs Nation, Paul Gillin, Maggie Fox, Debbie Weil, Chris Ballard from Sports Illustrated, Michael Yon.

The list goes on and on. These are the pioneers of new media, the most respected and widely read bloggers in their fields.

We are just one week away from hearing from all of them, and all of you. On a personal note all I can say is….

WOOT!

When we talked to our friends at Southwest Airlines about becoming the “Official Airline of BlogWorld & New Media Expo” we suggested we do something fun. While brainstorming we came up with the idea of a caption contest where Southwest fans could post their suggested caption for a photo of Southwest’s choosing. Then other folks could come and vote on their favorites and against the captions they didn’t like. The winner would receive free airfare from Southwest Airlines, Three nights free hotel stay from the MGM Grand and free registration to BlogWorld.

One of our challenges was putting together the contest quickly and setting up a voting system. Then it hit us, one of our exhibitors Spigit did exactly that.

We called them up and asked them if they could/ would like to do it. They said no problem and in about three days they had everything built. After clearing Southwest’s legal department the contest was announced on Oct 19th and ran until yesterday the 26th.

After 800 posts and almost 24,00 views in seven days on the contest site, and 42 comments on the Southwest blog I would say it was a pretty big hit.

The winner will be officially announced on Monday but I think if you take a look at the contest site it kind of gives it away.

Thanks to Paula, Brian and the Southwest Airlines team for just being the fun folks they are, Padmanabh and his team at Spigit for creating a great contest site on such short notice, to all the bloggers out there who helped spread the word about the contest and to everyone who voted and participated.

See you all in Vegas in a couple weeks and I hope you are all flying my favorite airline Southwest.

Blog on!
Rick Calvert
CEO & Co-founder
BlogWorld & New Media Expo

If you haven’t heard the show already, take a listen to Jim Turner’s interview with La Shawn last Friday.  La Shawn will be speaking at GodblogCon November 9th during BlogWorld & New Media Expo.

I really hate announcing this but a couple weeks ago Arianna’s people called and asked if we could reschedule her talk for the Nov 8th Keynote.  We asked them to give us a couple of days to try and rework the schedule as this would effect 3 other people (Jeremy Wright, Roger L. Simon, and Jim Lanzone) who had all made plans to participate in that panel.

After we were able to get all of her co-panelists  to agree to re-arrange their schedules and give their talk on Nov 9th, her office told us she was going to cancel her appearance completely.

I know many of you were looking forward to seeing and hearing from Arianna at the show. So was I. If you are still interested in hearing her speak, it looks like she will now be at the Media and Money conference in New York on November 7th.  Registration is $2,100.

in their new weekly Youtube program. Thanks for the plug guys.  Josh and Nate are with Unique Blog Designs and can be found in booth # 437 at the show.  Nate will be speaking on November 9th at 10 am on what else… Blog Design.  If your blog needs a face lift be sure to check with Nate and Josh. They have designed several notable bloggers sites including ShoeMoney’s.

Thats right. b5 media has just added an entire day of new sessions to our already huge program of seminars at BlogWorld. Anyone with a full access pass is welcome to attend any of the b5 seminars on Wednesday November 7th (except their private meeting at the end of the day). Discounted registration ends today so register now.

Here is the schedule:

9:15 - 10:00 - Brian Clark / Aaron Brazell - How to Use Digg to Assplode Your Blog

10:15 - 11:00 - Jeremy Wright / Allen Stern - Thriving as a B-List Blogger

11:15 - 11:45 - Marshall Kirkpatrick / Tris Hussey - Creating a Powerblogging Toolset

12:00 - 12:30 - Brian Layman / Mark Jaquith - Amping Up Your WordPress Blog

2:30 - 3:15 - Leora Zellman / Mary Jo Manzanares - Survival Tips for Network Bloggers

3:30 - 4:15 - Alex Hillman / Jake McKee - Creating Conversations With Your Readers

5:00 - 6:00 - Jeremy: State of the Bee’s Ass (b5media update talk) (PRIVATE)

the blogosphere’s own NZ Bear AKA Rob Neppell appeared yesterday on the New Fox Business channel and represented the blogosphere quite well. Take a look at the video clip here.

**Update10.21.07 6:22 pm**

The link below is to a scraper blog, not any site owned or maintained by Duncan Riley. This was my mistake.  and I apologize to him for the error.  The post was originally listed on TechCrunch but was removed within a few minutes.

Duncan has responded in the comments section and at his own blog.  I have left a comment below and at his site as well.

***

At least he strongly suggests it with this post:

I’ve had some private discussions with the organizers before about the conference, and I’m certain that Michael will be providing good coverage of it, which is why I’m somewhat dismayed to note that they are spamming bloggers in an attempt to get people to attend.

So lets clear the air. We are not spamming anyone period. The company who sent the clumsy email (particularly given the nature of the post they referenced) to Duncan is OuterJoin. They are an exhibitor in our show. They offered to send some emails to bloggers on our behalf to help promote the show and we thought it was a good idea. I still do.

Read the rest of this entry »

The show airs tonight. Mark needs our help to win this thing. Check out this excerpt from his Facebook dancing with the stars page:

Mark invited you to “Dancing with the Stars - Vote for Mark and Kym - Again P4 !” today, October 15 at 8:00pm.

Mark says, “Thanks again to all that voted for us ! Its time to rally the troops again. anything you can do, call 1800 VOTE 411, go to abc.com text, get your friends, school and coworkers.

We need every vote we can get !

You can visit his facebook site here.

related. Check out Tyler Bleszinki’s post at Ahteletics Nation. Tyler thinks Mark buying the Cubs would be good for baseball.

We are really excited about the line up of Sports Bloggers appearing and talking at BlogWorld & New Media Expo. If you are a sports fan you are really going to enjoy these panels. This is a who’s who of the sports blog world. Will Leitch from DeadSpin, Tyler Bleszinski from Athletics Nation, Matt Cerrone from Mets Blog, Chris Ballard and BJ Schecter from Sports Illustrated and many more.

Here is a list of the sessions:

• Sports Bloggers and Sports Journalists: Where One Ends and the Other Begins
• Sports Blogging: The Struggle for Respect
• How to Build an Audience for your Sports Blog
• Sports Blogging and Access: A Marriage Made in Heaven?
• Battling the Sports Media Giants: How Sports Blogging Has Advantages over the main stream media

Thanks to our sponsor Sports Blogs Nation for putting a great program together. We could not have pulled it off without them and thanks to Doc’s Sports for supporting the sports blog track at BlogWorld.

You can register to attend the show and the sports blog sessions here. See you in Vegas and Go Padres…..Errrr well….Go Chargers!