Blogging

• Google Changes Universal Search
  Universal Search has changed the way we view search engines and even the act of searching. Now Google has changed the way video shows up in the Universal Search results.
  (tags: search searchengines google News)
• YOUmoz | Is SEO a Service?
  YouMoz member MikeTek writes: “SEO” has become a catch-all of sorts. As a result the term can be unclear, perhaps even meaningless. Not because there isn’t such a thing, but because there is no clear understanding, no central definition of the term.
  (tags: seo searchengineoptimization searchengines article)
• The Fire Horse Trail: Evolution and the Art of SEO
  Great and insightful blog post by David Harry.
  (tags: seo search internet)

Blog World celebs John Chow and Tim Ferriss (Photo by Shashi Bellamkonda)

Richard Avedon once said: “All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.”

Truth or not - the good news is: Hundreds of little Avedons were among the attendees of this year’s Blog World Expo. Everybody took pictures of everything and everybody else (especially of the ‘celebs’). Since we live in the age of photo sharing, I don’t have to rely on my own snapshots anymore. As of now, 4587 photos related to the BWE have been posted on Flickr. Wow - and all these pics were taken in 3 days (if you include Friday with all the BWE partner programs)!

Since I was curious what kind of pictures my fellow bloggers were taking, I made the effort to browse through Flickr and find the accounts which include a great variety of this year’s new media and blogging conference in Las Vegas.

These are my 10 most favorite Blog World Expo photo collections on Flickr:

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As I mentioned in my previous post, the thing which surprised me most about my experience at this year’s Blog World Expo in Las Vegas is the fact that all the attendees - including the famous and successful A-Bloggers - were super cool, friendly and willing share many blogging “secrets”.

As a long time fan and avid reader of the infamous blog Problogger, I am especially pleased that Darren was kind enough to give me a couple of minutes of his valuable time, accepted to be “dragged” to a quiet conference room and was willing share his wisdom about blogging in a one on one interview (ca. 5 minutes).

In this interview, I ask him…

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Robert Scoble, Hugh McLeod and Stowe Boyd during the B5 Advisory Board Q&A

One day before the official Blog Word Expo started, B5 Media - one of the largest blog networks in the world - was running a training day for their bloggers, titled B5 Blogger Summit, that was opened up to any BWE registrants that wanted to attend.  Needless to say that I did not want to miss this great opportunity to get blogging tips from the pros and get to know the people behind this rapidly expanding blog network in person.

In the hindsight I have to say that it was totally worth to take this additional day off and travel to Las Vegas already on Thursday night in order to be fresh and ready for the first session on Friday at 9 AM. Here’s why:
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After attending the Blog World Expo last weekend, I have to say that I feel enriched in many ways: I made new connections with interesting fellow bloggers of all sorts, learned a whole lot about blogging, microblogging, online journalism and social media at all these sessions and workshops - and I got new energy and inspirations as a blogger and online writer.

Although I lost my beloved cordless computer mouse (by Logitech) and customized mouse mat with a photo from the beach of Santa Monica, it was totally worth the 300 miles drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas (yes, I went by car) and be a participant of this young conference (2008 was the 2nd edition).

There are countless things I will remember from this great event - but these are my 5 most important takeaways:

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I am excited to say that I am going to attend the world’s largest blogging and new media conference this year, the Blog World Expo in Las Vegas. Over 130 speakers will talk about a wide range of topics in 50+ seminars, workshops and keynotes during September 20 and 21. The seminar cover topics such as Blog monetization, Podcasting, Widgets, Open Source, Social Media, Political Blogging, Content Marketing, Personal Branding - and much much more. Given that there are so many great speakers and fascinating things to hear, learn and talk about, it’s difficult to pick the ‘best’ sessions.

One thing I already know: I definitely want to go to the Seminar Making money online with a blog, where the “super panel” including iconic personalities like Darren Rowse (Problogger), Brian Clark (Copy Blogger), John Chow, Shoemoney, Zac Johnson and Jim Kukral are going to talk about their journey to become successful blogger and hopefully share some great tips. As John Chow promised on his blog: “You will not want to miss this session because we’re going to blow your mind.” Well, that’s a teaser…
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With a live audience of 75,000 people and a TV audience of 38 million viewers, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama delivered not only his best, but also the most watch Convention speech ever. It won rave reviews from the media as much for style as for substance. Pundits praised it as “one killer speech”, “more a symphony than a speech”,  an “soaring oratory” with “the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains as a backdrop”, among others.

Barack and bloggers have one thing in common: They both have to rely on their phrasing skills in order to make their case in front of an audience. 

Barack certainly delivered. Can you?

Here are 10 things you can learn from Obama’s acceptance speech:

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Darren Rowse had a great idea: he organized a Killer Titles contest on his popular blog Problogger as part of its latest group writing project.

The contest is only three day old, but the list with the submissions is already very long. Here are my 10 favorites so far:

• Soy! Oh Boy! by Liz Scherer
• A Slacker Wife Celebrates Do Nothing Day by Sandra Foyt
• How to Get Half a Million People to Visit Your Blog by Simon
• If I Unsubscribe from Your List Will You Ever Talk to Me Again? by Des Walsh
• Stop Being Broke Right Now: Kick Off Financial Success with 10 Minutes and $10 by Dave
• Banish Blogger Butt in 7 Beneficial Ways by Stephanie Quilao
• How to Despise a Country in 10 Minutes or Less by EC Stewart
• If your life was a book, would you read it? by Rich 
• Twitter and Plurk get Pinged by Jen
• Masturbation means never having to say your sorry by Millar Prescott
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I have to admit. I am not the biggest fan of optimizing Flash websites. There are tons of blog posts which have written extensively how to SEO Flash. We all know the reasons: The search engines don’t know how to crawl these kind of sites, they eat up too much bandwidth, they have a slow load time, they’re CPU heavy etc.

From today there will be less headaches for SEOs and more love for Flash - supposedly.  Google and Yahoo announced that they will be able to crawl Flash websites - thanks to Adobe. Apparently the software company has created a special Flash player which will aid the search engine in crawling the web content.

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Another day. Another overwhelming amount of interesting blog posts about Search Engine Optimization. Many good articles. Here are my picks my today’s Top 10:

- Search Insider: Digital asset optimization: The inevitable evolution of SEO
DAO = Next generation SEO. A new buzzword. Certainly the evolution of SEO, according to Andrew Hazen. It’s all about moving the focus of optimization efforts from the page text to more relevant assets, such as images, audio and video. Very interesting.

- Simon Shandler: Advanced SEO: Siloing Content
Bruce Clay’s famous Siloing website structuring strategy - explained in simple words.

- SEOMoz Daily SEO Blog: The Evil Side of Google? Exploring Google’s User Data Collection
Great and frightening post what methods the Big G uses to get data.

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