Blogging While Brown 2010, Technology Review Panel

Saturdays are the typical meaty day of information and learning during Blogging While Brown weekend and this year was no different. The first panel on June 19th was a Technology Review featuring Cheryl Contee of Jack and Jill Politics, Angela Benton of Black Web 2.0 and Adam Conner of Facebook’s Washington, D.C. office.

There were so many great comments and suggestions that I can’t properly credit each answer to each panelist. I was making my first attempt at live Facebooking and Twittering and between that and my notepad I just lost  track of myself (LOL). But here are a few items that stood out to me as things to follow up on post-conference.

• One of the panelists mentioned the value of having contributing writers for your blog. That’s a good point. You add fresh perspective and new ideas in that way. For political blogs in particular you can submit your site to Google as a political resource.
• Add widgets designed for personal interests. It’s a way of improving your site as a design change. I might add that  contracting or having a good programmer on your blogging team could prove beneficial too.
• Use Disqus as a commenting platform for your blog. Jack and Jill Politics uses it to manage their commenting community. Seems like a good management tool.
• Many colleges and universities have ceased establishing new student email accounts on their servers. Instead they use texting and Facebook communities.
• Semantic widgets were mentioned as a potential tool for our blogging tool  boxes.

Another that seems to have great potential for wider spread use is something called augmented reality. Seems to have been around for a little while but here’s more in case it’s new to you as it was for me. According to the Wikipedia page on the matter “With the help of advanced AR technology (e.g. adding computer vision and object recognition) the information about the surrounding real world of the user becomes interactive and digitally usable.” In reading only that much I’m imagining business possibilities from my animation curriculum. Thanks again Blogging While Brown!

The panelists were outstanding, giving us insights into their world as successful bloggers and answering questions from the floor. Each of them had a key take away that was valuable to me. Cheryl suggested the we invite consistent commenters to be contributing post writers and integrate them into our team. Angela suggested incorporating webisodes into our sites.

The keys for me though were the main reason I went to the conference this year, social media tips and Adam gave me a good twofer on fine tuning Fan pages. One was the official Facebook Pages page and Facebook Insights, the social media company’s analytics tool to measure your fan page traffic. I have the foundation set for my new company’s fan pages and these tools definitely solidify the ground beneath me.

I thought it couldn’t get much better than this but there was more great subject matter to come the rest of the day. More about those panels in the coming days.

Be Sociable, Share!

•