gregword

Ross is the man; I’ve been loving his weekly posts summarizing the weekly goings-on of the DC tech community. Now he’s taken it one step further: DC Tech Events Weekly, a site dedicated to summarizing the next 7 days of what’s happening in DC tech stuff. Simply awesome.

And check this, Ross goes into a bit more detail on the inner-workings of DC Tech Events:

In January I posted about an idea I called the “Editorial Calendar Aggregator“, but I hadn’t really connected it to any particular task I needed such a tool to accomplish….Things started to fall into place after I set up a database and a thin web interface to edit events with. Now I find myself almost there– The system currently pulls in event data from 21 different groups automatically, and I can annotate the events that come in as I see fit. I want to support a few more calendar formats, add an approval queue (so I can subscribe to more general event streams, like searches from Upcoming.org and Eventful, without accepting every event), and publish in one or more forms of output that are actually reusable, but none of those things are much of a leap from what I have now.

In checking out the other sponsors for Thursday’s TECH Cocktail DC, I was introduced to Wine Library TV. I’m not a huge wine drinker (I’m more of a scotch guy), but I find myself very intrigued by the show, which is done extremely well; the host, Gary Vaynerchuck, shows great enthusiasm and really makes a topic I wouldn’t normally be interested in compelling. There’s even a whole episode devoted to kosher wines!

And today I noticed that Cork’d, a niche social network for wine-lovers, was acquired by Wine Library TV. The combination of original content, user-generated content, social networking and, most importantly, high-end products that cater to high-income demographics, seems like a good combination. I’d bet that something like this would work for scotch, cigars, maybe even beer (putting aside the issues with selling this stuff online, which can be tricky). It’s nice to see a business model that doesn’t rely on advertising.

Anyone going to the NextDC event tonight? I’m going to do my best to get there. And Social Media Club is tomorrow night, I’m going to shoot for that one as well.

Got back from PubCon on Friday. Overall, it was a really good conference. I’ve been focused so much on blogs and social media over the past few years, in some ways I forgot that there is a whole other part of the web that doesn’t care about buzz words or hip technology, but about dollars and cents. It’s been really interesting talking to people who run their own businesses online and hear some of the issues they deal with in making real money online.

The Sessions:

A typical pattern for me at conferences: I begin by going to lots of sessions, then taper off and spend most of my time in the hallways talking to people, and towards the end go back to the sessions. I was a bit disappointed by the sessions at PubCon, I really didn’t find that they were giving me any information I didn’t already know (this includes sessions on topics I know really little about, like things like PPC and SEO). A few of the sessions I attended and my thoughts:

Feeds, Blogs, News and Search: This session was pretty good. Niall Kennedy gave a good overview of some of the technical details behind syndication formats. Rick Klau gave a good overview of some of the applications that consume feeds beyond basic aggregators. Owen Byrne gave an overview of digg, including an interesting tidbit about how many servers they have (about 90, not all for production. I always find it interesting to find out how many servers services are using, as well as their architechture, ‘cuz I think about scalability quite a lot, and love getting hints at how much iron it takes to serve various levels of traffic. We’re doing about 500K searches a day on 3 servers). Chris Tolles gave an overview of Topix. I would have liked to have had more discussion on the basics of syndication, aggregators, etc. I also think it would have been helpful to discuss the role that blogs and feeds play in helping with rankings in the major search engines (like it or not, 90% of your traffic is going to come from Google, not from feed-consuming applications). There’s been a lot of rumors and misinformation about how Google handles feeds, and if they help in optimizing search rankings. Also, based on comments from the folks from the major search engines, a blog sounds like the ideal type of site for getting ranked. Some discussion of this would have been helpful to convey the value of having a blog or feed.

Podcasting and Net Radio 101: A good session. While the session provided some good information, I thought it focused too much on podcasting from a business perspective, overlooking podcasting as content. I’m going to post more about podcasting in the future based on some of my experiences over the last two months, but I will say that, from my experience, promoting a podcast is completely different from promoting a web site. There wasn’t much discussion of iTunes or other community building techniques that work very well for podcasts.

Interactive Site Reivews and SERP Quality Control Forum: This was really cool. The panel included folks from the major search engines (Matt Cutts from Google, Tim Mayer from Yahoo) as well as Danny Sullivan and other search experts. Basically, people from the audience submit their sites to the panel for review, and the panelists tear them a new one (not in a bad way…they are really helpful). It was really informative, and amazing to me how many of these sites were suffering from so many problems that a decent content management system such as Wordpress could take care of in a snap (it’s not just for blogs). Most of the panelists stressed the importance of unique content (this is a big deal for e-commerce sites that post just snippets from databases, and all the sites use the same database), and offered starting a blog as a good way to build unique content. Many other really good tips, some obvious, some based on inside information from Google or Yahoo. Very informative.

All in all, it was a good conference, and I learned a lot, and had a good time (oh, and the Yahoo party, that was fun). If you’re looking for more coverage, check out Search Engine Roundtable for a good summary of the sessions. As for a general overview of the conference, and why I went, Chris Tolles said it best.

I’m about to head out the door to catch my plane to Las Vegas for WebmasterWorld PubCon, and I’m really psyched. It’s my first PubCon, as well as my first time in Vegas. I wanted to write up a post with what sessions I’m going to go to, but haven’t had the time (perhaps I’ll knock a few posts out on the plane; I’ve got a bunch, on various topic, in the works, but time has been short of late). Mostly I’m going to learn all I can from the folks who are the experts at stuff like PPC, affiliate marketing, SEO, etc. I’m now making my living online, and while my current venture is doing well and continuing to grow, there’s always more to learn and perhaps other areas to get into. So I’m planning on going to as many sessions as I can, talking to and meeting as many people as I can, and learning as much as possible. So please come over and say hello if you see me (I’ll be wearing my Blogdigger t-shirt for at least some of the time, or just look for the guy with the lid, otherwise, here’s what to look for). And don’t forget to talk to my partner-in-crime, Michael Miller. He’s a lot smarter than I am.

If you want to get in touch, you can leave a comment here, email me a greg AT blogdigger DOT com. Or, feel free to call me, my cell phone is 443-928-2961. We’re staying at the Renaissance starting on Tuesday (tonight we’re at the Villa Roma, getting in late), heading back on Thursday night. See you there!

If I weren’t flying back from Vegas on the night of the NY TechCrunch party, I’d organize an overflow party. I bet you’d get just as many people at the overflow as you would at the TechCrunch event, and since the signups for TechCrunch have been pretty much first come/first serve, chances are you’d get a similar quality of people. I’d bet you could even get sponsorships, as well as some cross-traffic between the two parties.

Conduit, one of the sponsors of the conference, are the folks behind the Blogdigger toolbar. They have a very cool application, if you’re in the market for a toolbar for your site or community, check them out.

Chris Heuer and the Social Media Club are coming to DC on Monday October 30th. Register here (it’s free), and there’s a blogger dinner afterwards as well.

One important topic the Social Media Club has been tackling lately is the issue of disclosure in the blogosphere.

See you there.

Note to all DC/Baltimore Social Media People (or anyone who loves the web): as much as we love Chris, we don’t need to wait until he comes to town to get together. We need to do these things monthly at the very least.

Mike and I are heading out to Vegas in November for WebmasterWorld’s PubCon. Should be pretty cool, the lineup of speakers looks excellent. I slept on registering for the hotel (mental note: unlike a plane ticket, you can cancel a hotel up to the day before for no charge…so book early even if you’re not sure you’re going to go), so we’re staying a bit away from the conference center, but hopefully that shouldn’t be a big deal.

If you’re going and want to get together, let me know.

Landed in Oakland this morning (well, afternoon for me, but whatever), visited with the family, got back to the hotel, and went looking for what’s going on. Wow. Upcoming.org is pretty much not useful in Baltimore, but for Palo Alto, it’s a goldmine. Here’s a list of stuff going on between now and Thursday (when I head back east):

• StartUpCamp
• Chris Heuer is getting old(er)
  
• Cal Henderson (Flickr) on Scalable Web Architectures - Common Patterns and Approaches
• Vertical Search
• SF Tech Sessions: Media distribution

Amazing; I forgot how much is going on on this coast. Hopefully I’ll be able to get to at least one of these.

If you’re in the DC area, make sure to sign up for DC 2.0, scheduled for Wed. March 15 in the Reston offices of Mintz Levin. Blogdigger is proud to be sponsoring the event, and I’ll be there to demo our service. More importantly, I’m hoping that this will be one of many future DC-area tech/geek/Web 2.0 gatherings.

Update: Despite what the Eventful page says, my understanding is that there are about 50 people registered so far. Check with Stowe Boyd for an exact count.