Blog World Expo Blog
Blogosphere’s Biggest Blogging Conference

If you recall, open social was launched late 2007 to allow for a common API to be used across multiple sites.  According to google, “A common API means you have less to learn to build for multiple websites.”  So is “open social” actually cathing on among the most popular social networks?  The answer is a resounding yes.  The graph below came from techcrunch and shows that “open social” currently has around 350 million users and is still growing steadily.

Currently “open social” is working with Myspace, Orkut, Hi5, Friendster.  Apparently 4 more social networks are slated to join open social to bring the estimated user count at around 500 million.  Dan Farber over at Cnet wrote an excellent article about open social including the details of the various updates and the announcement that google is proposing to create an “open social foundation.”

As Dan Farber puts it “open social makes good economic sense,” and I agree with him.  It’s very exciting to see how “open social” continues to grow and we do know what facebook is not going to be joining the “movement,” at least not yet anyway.

What do you think about the enormous growth of “open social”?

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American Airlines just announced that they are going to be offering broadband internet on some of the longer domestic flights.  Reuters reports that passengers will be able to pay $12.95 to get internet access from the following flights:

• New York - San Francisco
• New York - Miami
• New York- Miami

American Airlines also said that eventually they are going to roll out their wifi access to all of their planes.  I am actually pretty excited  by this announcement.  I fly quite a bit and there have definitely been times where I wished I could just have access to wifi.  Eventually we are going to see wifi come as a common amenity on most airplanes and hopefully it will be free.

Crunchgear reports on the stats from the wifi connection and the stats actually looks quite good.  According to Crunchgear the dl speed is around 1,784 kbps which is comprable to most cable and dsl connections, not bad for internet in the skies huh?

As technology continues to evolve and as social media gets bigger I think it is going to be very important for people to know that they can “connect.”

According go the Chicago Tribune Southwest, Jetblue, United, and Virgin America, are all planning on launching their own wifi services on their fleet of planes.  Some of the wifi networks should be up and ready to go by the end of this year.

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According to the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ASCI) customer satisfaction with online business websites has reached new highs.  Compared with last year, the ASCI has climbed around 6% to 79.3/100.  If you were to think of this as a test score, you could say that you received a C+, but with persuasive convincing this could also be a B-.

According to Claes Fornell, head of the ACSI at the University of Michigan,”

“The increase in overall e-business satisfaction is driven largely by a remarkable jump by Google, but tough economic conditions may be contributing to greater satisfaction with the sector.  “In an environment where dollars are tight and gas is $4 a gallon, consumers derive great satisfaction from services that don’t require them to spend money or get in their car.”

Among the top climbers in the ASCI was seach engine giant, Google, they climbed 10% to reach an overall score of 86, one of the highest overall scores.  I wish I could say Yahoo saw similar increases in overall satisfaction, but unfortunately they did not.  Yahoo actually fell 3% to 77 points, this fall is credited to the big merger and acquisition debacle that has been on everyone’s mind lately.

MSN remains unchanged at 75 and Ask.com fell 1% to 74 points.  AOL increased 3% but still remains the overall laggard of the group with a low 69 points overall score.

Techcrunch has a simple bulleted list of scores from the search engines and news portals that you may want to check out.

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According to an article by the Wall Street Journal, Google is planning on setting up an 8,000 square foot base camp for hundreds of bloggers at the Democratic convention in Denver next week.  Not only that but Google is going to set up a similar blogger station for the Republican convention in September.  Wired has a similar article written as well that is worth checking out.

It’s interesting to see that government and politics are becoming more and more engaged with social media. Congressman John Culberson has his own twitter account with over 3,000 followers.  Representative Tim Ryan also has his own twitter account.  Politics and social media just seem to go so well together.  We have already seen youtube used as a debate platform, several politicians are already using twitter, and now we are going to have Google provide a blogger lounge at the conventions.

According to Simon Rosenberg, president and founder of the NDN,

“There’s no such thing as off the record anymore. There’s no such thing as private moments anymore”

Bloggers who wish to participate in these events have to pay $100 to get access to couches, food, beverages, wifi, and Google massages!  Not bad hm?  If you’re not a blogger, then maybe you should start blogging asap.

These conventions are going to be new media havens.  People are going to be walking around streaming live on qik, blog posts will be flying up at record speeds, the twittersphere is going to be buzzing, youtube videos are going to get uploaded by the hundreds, and the whole world is going to be able to watch and participate.

It’s great to see how far social media has been able to progress and evolve over the years.  Social media is still in the infancy stages and it’s only going to grow from here.  See you at the conventions.

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For those of you not familiar with the term “cloud computing” basically refers to the internet (or cloud) as a device that handles our information processing.  Think about how you access your gmail or yahoo mail accounts or all those social networks or blogs you participate in.  Generally people refer to the availability and the service of all these tools as just being a part of the “cloud,” thus the “cloud” is doing the computing for us.  You don’t have to be an expert to get or calculate information online, you access to all the resources and information in the world.  Generally speaking nobody owns the cloud and we are plugged into it.

Enter Dell who recently tried to trademark this term to refer to their “Cloud Computing Solutions.”  According to an article written by Zdnet:

“The USPTO has declared that the phrase “cloud computing” is a “generic” term used to describe a broad type of computing and therefore cannot be trademarked.”

According to Dell the trademark was just meant to protect their own specific services and was not mean to steal “cloud computing” with the definition mentioned above.  Still, it is a bit ironic that any company would want to trademark a term that refers to something that is owned and used collectively, this take away from the definition of the “cloud” and I’m glad the trademark won’t go through.  Sure Dell mentioned that they wanted to trademark the term for their own services but come on, surely Dell of all companies knows what cloud computing is.

You can read more about the Dell “cloud computing” trademark story at The Register or on Sam Johnston’s blog.

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A couple of weeks back Super Star blogger Darren Rowse asked me if he could run a contest on Problogger to give a way a Full Conference Pass to BlogWorld to one of his readers. It took me about 2 seconds to say “YES LETS Give AWAY TWO!”.

Well The contest is now closed and we had to do the hard work of picking two winners out of the 60 some add entries.

This was a hard choice. Do we give the pass to Katja whose post really tugged at my heartstrings? but to be honest I had to wonder if it was real or just a ploy to get a free pass.

Or to Nathan Driver? His tag line “Driven In Life” is fantastic! and his post was witty.

Then there was Chris. I had to ask myself, do we want to give this guy a pass just so I can say he traveled all the way from Thailand just to buy me a beer?

Linda Bustos’ post was very clever spelling out BlogWorld in her short 9 line plea but she get’s DQ’d for spelling Darren’s name wrong.

I briefly considered Jack’s entry which was good. Then I thought to myself he writes for Gizmodo he can afford his own damn pass. On second thought maybe not; it is Gawker.

In the end Jennifer Taggart won me over with the offer of free cookies.

I don’t have a sad story about my health or finances to persuade you that I “deserve” a pass. But, I would love to win one – would bribery help? Can I send you homemade cookies from scratch? I’ve been blogging for a year, focusing on green and non-toxic solutions for the home, focused on babies and kids. I’d love to go to learn and to network. I know it will take my blogging to the next level. I’ll blog and tweet about it. I’ll also drag my husband, who absolutely refused to attend BlogHer’08 (he commented that he would rather sit on the curb outside the entire time) to Vegas without our kids! Plus, my birthday is just 2 weeks after the conference. Is that a good enough reason?

That and having attended BlogHer myself, I think her husband deserves the trip to Vegas.  Just bring the cookies along with you and we can share them at the show Jennifer 8). I promise to put a good word in with your husband about BlogHer.

Our second winner is Katja whose story is true and having gone through so much recently definitely deserves the trip!

Congratulations Jennifer and Katja!

For the runner’s up mentioned in this post. You each have a consolation prize of 50% off on a full conference pass. Honestly I hope you all decide to come. We will have a blast.

Oh and Ron Meyer you get a 50% off pass as well. A guy who starts blogging at 57 about dirt track racing just has to be at BlogWorld so I hope that is enough to motivate you to join us.

Thank you again to Darren Rowse for organizing and hosting the contest and to everyone who participated.

Blog on!
Rick

Just recently, Microsoft launched a new blog devoted to Windows 7.  Per the new blog:

“We strongly believe that success for Windows 7 includes an open and honest, and two-way, discussion about how we balance all of these interests and deliver software on the scale of Windows. We promise and will deliver such a dialog with this blog.”

The blog just went up a few days ago and already has hundreds of comments.  A lot of folks have backlashed against the new Windows platform for not being able to work well with other software packages.  Hopefully the two way discussion in the Windows 7 blog will make sure that the new release will be well accepted.  The fact that Microsoft is using a blog for it’s new operating system is a great testimonial to the fact the blogs can be used for many things apart from just posting news or thoughts, a blog can also be used for:

• product development
• focus groups
• relationship building
• product marketing
• feedback

I hope that the new Windows 7 blogs does indeed serve to open the line of communication between developers and users.  So far it seems to be working as hundreds of readers have poured in to discuss Windows, not just with Microsoft, but with each other.

Let the conversations begin…

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For those of you not familiar with Pandora, it is a platform devoted to the music genome.  What this means is that you can listen to a particular artist that you like, then Pandora will suggest other bands you may like based on that choice.  Pandora uses a complex system to analyze the music to make these recommendations, it’s truly a unique service.

Unfortunately, the free streaming music platform that allowed us to listen to great music while discovering new artists is in danger of closing.  Pandora is having trouble paying the ridiculous royalty and as a result may have reached the end of their figurative rope.  Pandora does generate a significant amount of revenue (25 million) but are forced to give up around 70% of that revenue to cover the fees.

Pandora has become extremely popular with monthly traffic of around 2.5 million (according to compete.com, actual number are most likely higher) and the traffic has been growing at a rapid pace.

Pandora also has one of the most popular iphone applications that allows users to stream music directly to their iphones.  According to this article by the Washington Post, Pandora attracts a whopping 40,000 new customers every day.  Tim Westergren who founded Pandora says, “We’re approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision.  This is like a last stand for webcasting.”

According to Michael Arrington from Techcrunch, Pandora may have to be our sacrificial lamb.  Let’s hope Pandora will be able to work something out so that we can keep enjoying their unique platform.

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This study was conducted by The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research and is a follow up to a similar study they conducted in 2007.  209 companies participated and were asked how familiar they were with blogging, podcasting, online video, wikis, and social networking.

According to the results of the new study, social networking was the most familiar among the companies that participated in the study.

Blogging also received an enormous jump as more and more fortune 500 companies are understanding the value of a blog.  This is definitely great to see!  According to the study 77% of the companies that participated in the study reported using some sort of social media.

The graph below shows that blogging is definitely becoming a staple in the social media strategy for the fortune 500 and the growth should only continue from here.

In 2007 when the companies were asked how important they viewed social media, 26% of the companies said that social media was “very important.”  In 2008 that figure rose by 18%, 44% of the companies now say that social media is “very important.”

The results of this study show that social media is continuing to grow among the fortune 500 companies.  This means that events like Blog World Expo are going to continue to be a haven for for companies and individuals looking to learn about blogging, social media, and the value of the conversation. If you want more information check out the full study.

Are you going to Blog World Expo?

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