BlogWorld Expo Sunday was another busy day for the ContentRobot team, and we concentrated our efforts on attending the keynote and the expo floor.

The Keynote

Rohit Bhargava, Timothy Ferriss, Mike Shinoda talked about building a personal brand. They offered these gems for thought:

  • Be more interested than interesting
  • Be vulnerable and open about your shortcomings and others will be more apt to help you out
  • Be approachable, not an a$$hole
  • Be consistent with who you are not what others want you to be
  • Make a promise to your fans in terms of what you have to offer and honor it
  • Don’t be the best in your category, create a new one
  • Never underestimate “unimportant” people, be nice to everyone
  • Define your goals and know what it means to meet them
  • It’s more important to have the right eyeballs, rather than a random number
  • Find your muse as it can help you to create a revenue stream
  • If you think it’s good – it probably is. Don’t worry about those who “don’t get it.”
  • Achievement + Appreciation = Success

The Expo Floor

We were in search of any and all cool product and service offerings that we might be able to bring to our clients. Here is a rundown of the favorites that we saw and the people we talked to:

  • coComment – This is a maturing external commenting toolset that easily snaps into blogs. coComment’s helps to enabling conversations and building communities. By increasing exposure to comments and bloggers, it can create a richer user experience that we thought could be quite useful.
  • DISQUS – Another powerful external commenting solution – do we see a trend here? – that connects your community with 30,000 other websites. Designed to making blogs more interactive, we will give these guys another look.
  • GooseGrade.com – As writers, we should be concerned with eliminating typos and mistakes in our work, and this tool allows others to help you edit your blog posts. Social editing could be good for those who are less comfortable with their prose and wanting some external traction. Thanks for the drink coupon, too!
  • IntenseDebate – Guess what? Another commenting tool! This one helps your website to help drive traffic with reader engagement. UPDATE: Automattic likes this one too, cuz they bought it soon after BWE.
  • JS-Kit – They offered some interesting widgets for comments, ratings, and polls. Guy Kawaski mentioned them in his lunch time keynote at the E&E conference as something to check out. Also, they had the cutest kitty stickers!
  • Layered Technologies – ContentRobot is always on the lookout for great hosts. We were pleased to see their deep plans and will check them out further.
  • Lijit – Lijit’s tools help publishers to increase page views and reader engagement with keywords and search ad revenue. We met this team last year and they continue to impress.
  • MindTouch – An open source collaboration / wiki tool that looked fairly simple to implement. Looks good for intranets and companies that are dispersed in various locations. We got a great Deki demo and Dana got a nice t-shirt.
  • Newstex – We met Newstex last year and think that their full-text feeds can add much interestingness and eyeballs to many companies’ blogs. Hi again to another Connecticut-based company!
  • SezWho – We also met SezWho last year and they continue to have some great, evolving tools. They engage the community with, yes, amped comments as a way to bring eyes to your sites.
  • Woopra – This is a feature-rich analytics tool that we have been testing on our blogs. Bonus: We got to chat with WordPress goddess Lorelle VanFossen at the booth.
  • Zemanta – With a simple plugin, bloggers can link to relevant audio, video, images, and other sites easily to provide a more rounded post. Thanks for the great demo, we are watching you guys.