Matt on Not-WordPress, mostly photos

I’m a Firefox/Flock guy at heart, but Microsoft just gave out this really nice bag that’s perfect in every way except for the Internet Explorer logo on the side. 😉 I don’t want to be shunned at the geek meetings and dinners, so I’ll probably stick to my current setup, but if I got a bigger laptop I’d probably use this bag. They also attached a CD with IE 7 beta on it, so that’s pretty interesting. I may try that out on my computer at work.

Dave Taylor and Robert Scoble are arguing about feeds. Full feeds vs. partial feeds, connectors and readers, ads vs no ads. Bob Wyman is saying partial feeds don’t matter, because you should be putting as much effort into your partial feed as into your full feed, don’t auto-generate excerpts. (Like most blog software does automatically. WordPress allows custom excerpts.)

They’re recommending going to geek dinners and networking events. Robert goes home with a stack of business cards and visits each site to see if anything is worth talking about.

Robert: Another thing I do is link to everything in the industry. The more inclusive you are the more authoritative you are.

I have a meeting at CNET I have to head to so I’m actually going to miss the parts of Dave’s session where he talks about Blogger and Typepad and “Smart Blogging Techniques.” I’ll update this post with links to people who did blog it when they surface on the search engines.

Dave Taylor is doing a fairly good talk, though I disagree with much of what he’s saying. (But most of the points he’s getting at are good.) However some human error I lost my first 20 minutes of notes, so I’m going to restart in the middle.

“Home pages don’t matter.”

“The design of my site doesn’t matter because more people read my site through RSS than coming to my site.” Design obviously matters, you need to get people to subscribe first!

Pings and Trackbacks. Pings are something that blogs do that make it worth blogging. Search engines tend to be slower, 2-4 weeks. It’s a fundamental problem with search engines. Sometimes content that used to be there isn’t anymore. Pinging is when your blog tool notifies certain other index sites. “Technorati and Feedster and others will all be crushed when Google and MSN and Yahoo release their RSS search engines.” Instead of you having to wait passively for search engine spiders to come to you, you now actively have a tool that let’s your content get out into what’s called the “blog oh sphere”. (No mention of Ping-O-Matic?)

How many know about what Meetup is? “I blogged about that.” About how the CEO notified all the members. 75 minutes later the CEO of the company was on my site responding to it.

Trackbacks, “interesting concept, very poorly implemented, but a lot of people talk about it.” Trackbacks are spammed to death. “I turned off trackbacks 9 months ago.” (He really should talk about Pingback, I get the impression he may not be up to date on blog technology.) He’s showing a comment spam email, looks like he’s running Version 2.63 of MT.

(Problem. Earlier he said he preferred partial feeds, but most of the search engines won’t index his content if it’s not in his feed.)

We’re taking a break now, I’ll publish so I don’t delete everything again. 🙂

I’m here at the Blog Business Summit and since the WYSIWYG has gotten pretty nice in WP I’m going to blog what I can from my spot in the back. We’ll see if it helps me follow things or just ends up being distracting.