First Day

As I mentioned in my audio post below, I attended two sessions on Saturday. The first was part of the Film Festival, and was really just a time filler until one of the Interactive sessions began. It was entitled Behind the Social Scenes and promised to be at the least funny and at the most scandalous, with comedian Andy Dick on the panel. But, Dick didn't show, so we were entertained by the likes of Maria Menounos (Access Hollywood) and Mo Collins (Mad TV). Others on the scheduled panel that did not show were Bob Odenkirk (Mr. Show) and Annabelle Gurwitch (she does that Dinner and a Movie night on one of the cable networks). Gurwitch is here promoting a movie about getting Fired, based on her own experience of being fired from a play by Woody Allen. Anyway, if the original panel had been there, it might have been good, but as it was, it was just a bunch of people talking about how important it was to network in the film industry. If you want to meet Jeff Zucker of NBC, you should babysit Maria Menounos' dogs.

The better panel of the day was entitled How to Make $$ with your Blog Design Skills. I didn't care about the financial implications of blogging, but I did learn a good deal about the future of the blogging platform. The panel included moderator Paul Chaney (Blogging Systems), Peter Flaschner (The Blog Studio), Suzie Gardner (hopstudios.com), Joelle Reeder (Moxie Design Studios), and Lisa Sabin (E. Webspaces). All these people make their living developing blogs for business and using blog technology as their development platforms. During the session, it became apparent that blogging is not merely a way for people to rant and comment, but is becoming a sophisticated development platform. Skills in designing blogs for businesses will be highly sought after. Blog technology is largely based on CSS (cascading stylesheets) and backend database management and programming (php or other languages).

And, there are some creative ways that blog software can be used to create advanced functionality on Web sites, like event calendars or other database driven activities that allow for easy, template-driven user access.

The users talked about the blog development platforms they use, including WordPress and Expression Engine. Check out Reeder's Moxie site at http://www.lovemoxie.com/ for an idea of a site that uses blog technology for full Web-site design.

So, I will be making a goal of focusing more on blogs, blog software and blog development.

Now, I am on to a session entitled How [and Why] to Podcast an Event. More later...