Enough Content for Two Weeks of Posts from BWE

It Was Fun

Image by eristoddle via Flickr

I have to say I really enjoyed Blog World Expo, not just for all the swag that almost had me buying a new bag to fit it all in, but that was nice. Not just for everything new I learned. But for the reality it gave to something I do that still had an unreality to it.

Maybe kids growing up today count the internet as part of their reality and I partially do. But it is, still the internet. It is hard to sometimes realize that you are interacting with real people when you write a post, comment or join in a conversation on a forum or social network when all you see is an avatar.

Being at the Expo gave me a new feeling of reality to all of this. Now I know some of the faces behind the avatars and signatures.

The Lessons Learned

For the most part I stayed on the monetization track. Today I went off on a tangent to listen to Tim Street talk about video and then back to the monetization track. And yesterday, I chose to watch the World Premiere of His Highness Hollywood rather than another panel.

I believe a lot in cross-pollination. You can spend most of the time you have on the main track you plan on taking, but you need to branch off every now and then to pull from areas that you haven’t dealt with that much. It brings in new ideas, stretches the brain and sometimes has a rebound effect of bouncing you back into your normal rut with a new energy.

One great thing BWE could do is provide a DVD set of all the panels. There were a few time slots that I wish I could have attended 2, 3, even 4 of the panels that were running simultaneously.

But to tell you the truth I am not sure if I would ever get to watching them. I have had a couple of dvds sitting at home that I have been meaning to watch for about 8 months now. To me, reading is faster, because I can speed read the parts I already know and I can move around in non-sequential order, but that is just the way I learn.

Content To Reality

I sat here tonight thinking how I would put all of the new things I learned and new products I found into a post. And I just don’t think I can. I think I have enough content for a couple of weeks, at least. So that might be just what I do.

Yes, it would be great to write about BWE while it is happening, and writing about it two weeks from now will be so “two weeks ago”, but it is what I will do. Because I bounced a few ideas off of people I met and heard their own. And it has me itching to write about it. I also have about 20 pages of notes.

I have also come away with a couple of new ideas that I can’t wait to toss out in a post and then start playing around with. One involves a dragon I have been chasing for months now.

I am a nervous guy in public for the most part and it was good to see some speakers having the same issues on stage. In fact, it was those speakers I respected and looked up to the most. Because I knew that they hadn’t totally conquered their fear yet, but they were still up there giving it all they could.

I am out of here tomorrow on a reverse time travel flight that in the reality of time zones will take 7 hours. I can’t wait to see my family again. I thought the peace and quiet of this empty hotel room would give me a lot of time to get work done, but maybe I need the noise of kids in the background at least once and a while to remind why I am doing this.