If you are interested in speaking at this years BlogWorld & New Media Expo then please use this link and submit your proposal ASAP. Last year we had over 1,000 people request to speak and only 100 slots to fill.  In fact it was so overwhelming that we went to the trouble of creating this fancy new form so please use it. We will not consider any requests that have not filled out the form completely and accurately.

Here is the link again.

Do you agree with 24/7’s list?

Read Geek Mommy’s post on why she doesn’t follow you Twitter.

Do blogs and other Internet news sources make the media less democratic?

CNet interviews John Battelle.

Chris Brogan gives a great summary of the new media tools available to businesses and tips on how to use them.

The New York Times (yes that New York Times) has tips on how to become a successful blogger. Now that is interesting.

 Oops. Someone had a boo boo. The beautiful thing about the blogosphere is if J and J handles this correctly going forward, they can make up for all the mis-steps and come out of this thing looking like real human beings who care about bloggers.

Technorati Tags: John Battelle,Chris Brogan,CNet,New York Times

I just came across this YouTube Video from John Chow. If you ever wanted more traffic to your blog then take a look:

why do we hate Vista?

It seems Joe Wilcox warned Microsoft about many of the reasons before the release.

More Chinese Internet repression.

A Mac patch named after Rush Limbaugh?

Techcrunch interviews former HP CEO and new RNC hired gun Carly Fiorina. 

Congrats to Chris Brogan whose blog is working again.

To listen to good advice from people like Scott Karp,

Why publish in reverse chronological order on the web? Because news is 24×7, breaking throughout the day. Which means that news consumers come to a news site more than once a day — checking the homepage is just a click away, and news consumers on the web click often.

When someone visits a news site on the web, what’s the first thing they want to know?

What’s NEW.

Organizing news by importance as the default makes sense when you’re only delivering the news once a day (and the “default” is all you get). But when news publishing is continuous, it’s not the best way to server frequent news consumers.

and Dave Winer?

I think every newspaper on the web should at least offer the reader a choice of a reverse-chronological view of the news. I think they would find most readers would use this view, most editors would too.

The sooner they do, they sooner they will be able to compete in this new media era.

If you were to charge there is a certain amount of navel gazing in the blogosphere and at events like SxSW you would be right. The fact is when events like SxSW and BlogWorld happen it gives us new media content creators a chance to meet up with old friends, make some new ones and meet many of our peers, mentors, and thought leaders that we admire from afar.

So you get a lot of people interviewing each other. I certainly did my share of interviews there, and was flattered when the famous kilt wearing podcaster Ewan Spence found me worthy of an interview.  You can listen to that interview here.

Meeting Darren Rowse of Problogger was one of the highlights of SxSW for me. If you want to make money with your blog then you need to make problogger.net a regular read. After attending his panel Online Advertising for Newbies Darren agreed to a short interview out in the all. Here it is:

lot’s of people like to hate on Jason and he loves it. If you haven’t figured it out yet Jason is a master of link baiting and this latest post is another classic example. I have only met Jason three times in very short and casual conversations. I have seen him give three keynotes. Two were fantastic and his talk at Gnomedex got derailed before it ever got started by Dave Winer.

I understood immediately that he likes to say controversial things to get peoples attention and at the end of the day he really doesn’t care what any of us think about him. With that in mind the main theme of his post is valid and 100% accurate.

If you want your start up company to succeed you need to spend wisely, save money where you can, make smart decisions and hire excellent people. You need to ideally not make bad hires to begin with but if you do, you need to cut that deadwood right away.

Following his advice will help you succeed. It doesn’t guarantee success, ignoring it doesn’t guarantee failure but I will be any of the wise men slamming Jason a year’s salary that most companies that succeed adhere to Jason’s philosophy rather than do the kumbaya lets all love each other and have perfect 9 - 5 jobs and take vacations BS. That stuff is all important but it all comes after you have a strong foundation for your company not before.

Mike Arrington gets it. Robert Scoble gets it. Mark Evans gets it.

Dave Winer responds today with a very valid point. Hot products are what makes a company succeed. That is fundamental. Some times crap succeeds but more often than not a quality product is a requirement to success not a gaurantee of it. Lots of companies with hot products fail for many of the reasons Jason listed in his posts, and some just have plain old bad luck, bad timing, etc.

While I agree with Dave that leaders should lead by example and be a model for their employees and inspire instead of intimidate; more than anything employees particularly in a start up need to believe in their product, company and leader more than they need to love their leader.

Taking Jason’s controversial style into account his main theme was you need to be driven to succeed. That drive needs to extend beyond the owner and founder, every employee needs to believe in that dream and be driven to see it succeed to have a realistic chance of succeeding.

Those aren’t new words of wisdom. They have been said and followed since the beginning of the entrepreneur and for people to dispute them is really just silly, or more likely the latest excuse to hate on Jason Calacanis.