We promised an inside look at the offerings at BlogWorld’s conference floor. Here is what we found:
- Blog advertising is alive and well. The majority of booths were featured money making schemes for your blogs. Since ContentRobot focuses on business blogging, we really didn’t spend much time here.
- Blog widgets were in vogue here. Were developers really hoping to code some sidebar goodies only in hopes of getting bought out? Time will tell.
- Another interesting trend was the talk of multimedia. Just like the promise of websites of a decade ago, the convergence of audio, video, and text on blogs seemed to be hot, hot, hot.
- Finally, social media (which of course was in the name of the conference) was everywhere – get those communities together anyway you can.
- The biggest omission? We were surprised that WordPress and Six Apart did not have booths at this show (tho Matt Mullenweg and Anil Dash were both featured speakers).
Booths we enjoyed:
AddThis provided a “button” to make it easier for visitors to bookmark and share your blog. Includes valuable statistics about the bookmarking and sharing activity of your users and can help you create a buzz for your site and increase its popularity and ranking.
Cliq showed off a sidebar widget that members of the same “CLIQ” to share links to featured, popular and related blog posts.
Lijit highlighted their search tool/widget that lets bloggers provide a comprehensive (Google) search of almost everything that you want, including integration with popular social networking tools such as Facebook.
Lingospot is an in-text search service that enables bloggers to increase reader engagement and dynamically crosslink their content. It was pretty cool and we spent alot of time talking to this team about this tool’s potential.
Newstex offers tailored, real-time news and commentary from thousands of branded newswires, newspapers, magazines, financial and business sources, official government feeds and weblogs.
Podango lets podcasters host and manage their own shows or stations using the company’s hosting, syndication, audience measurement and Web site creation tools. Also has an embeddable podcast player for use in blogs.
Outbrain offered a ratings widget that was compatible with all major blogging platforms. The integration was nice, flawless, and free.
SodaHead allows you to create a poll and share it with your friends, or share it with experts identified by the SodaHead community, or even share it with complete strangers.
Talkshoe enables anyone to easily create, join, or listen to live interactive discussions, conversations, podcasts and audioblogs.
Utterz allows you to post voice, video, picture, and text mashups via your mobile phone right to your blog.