My focus this past year has been online content and membership sites.

I’m blogging about my experiences here: http://www.MemberCon.com

Yep, it’s true. New Media Expo and BlogWorld will be the same event in 2009!

When we held the first Portable Media Expo in 2005, I knew nearly everyone at the event by first name, or at least by the name of their podcast! It was exciting to walk down the hallway of the convention center and catch bits and pieces of the conversations. I heard, “I’ve been listening to your show for months – it’s great to finally meet you!” over and over again. As podcasting grew, it became obvious that most podcasters had not only their show, but a blog, a twitter account, a Flickr account, a YouTube channel, a Facebook account, and more. Podcasting was another way people were communicating with their networks and we could see that an event that focused just on podcasting was missing parts of the picture. We added other types of online multimedia to the conference and the scope of the Expo continued to grow.

Rick, Dave and Libby then started BlogWorld because a national event for bloggers was missing and they did a tremendous job of bringing together all aspects of the blogosphere. I’ve known Rick for several years now – we met a few years before he started BlogWorld because we were both in the tradeshow business and met at industry events. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Rick and his colleagues at BlogWorld and as I thought about it more, I realized the two events really did need to come together as one. Rick and I had been talking about doing something together for a while.

Ultimately, I’m an entrepreneur. I love starting events and websites and seeing where I can take them. But I also know when it’s time to let someone else take that vision and run with it. Taking the New Media Expo to the next stage is something I know Rick and his team at BlogWorld can do well. Handing over the reigns of the New Media Expo to the passionate and capable team at BlogWorld is going to allow me even more time to develop several podcasting sites I’ve been working on for a while.

This is going to be a great move for both attendees and exhibitors. A single event that covers blogging, podcasting and all other forms of new media is truly needed for everyone to create better content and provides a huge networking event for everyone involved in this space.

I thank all of the podcasters, bloggers and online video creators that have supported the Expo and the Podcast Brothers over the years. I’m excited to see where it all goes from here – it’s an exciting time to be in new media – and I’ll see you at BlogWorld and New Media Expo next year!

We’ll have more information on a Podcast Brothers show coming up tomorrow.

Most folks don’t know that Emile and I produce events in other industries outside of New Media. In the past few months, we’ve been focusing on those events and websites that we’ve been neglecting recently because we were full throttle on New Media Expo.

But we’re back and next week we’ll have some very interesting announcements for the 2009 New Media Expo. We’ll also be putting out an episode of Podcast Brothers in the next two weeks.

One of our attendees sent me an email this past week about setting up a pre-networking group on LinkedIn.com. So we did! If you’re a member of LinkedIn.com, we’ve set up a group for New Media Expo attendees and anyone else interested in networking with fellow content creators.

But it brings up an interesting point. There are hundreds of sites and services where I can setup groups, micro-sites and social networking pages. I could literally spend my entire day signing up for new sites, entering my information, and then maintaining that information as we get closer to the Expo. When is enough, enough?

For a conference or business, the answer is probably – it’s never enough – sign up for as many as possible so that every person out there can find you somewhere. But the answer for an individual is probably different. You may sign up for a bunch of new services during their private beta and launch but only use a few on a regular basis.

I hear a lot about how social media overload is coming – folks for me I’m already there. As an individual I use a handful of services – it’s all I can do to keep up with those. As a business owner, I use as many as possible, which means I’m probably not using any of them as well as I should.

Ultimately, you need to decide if the services you are using are just creating “busy work” and those that are truly helping you enrich your experiences online – and off!

How do YOU decide what’s working for you and what’s just “busy work?”

NOTE: Badges for registered New Media Expo attendees will start mailing next week. Be on the lookout for yours!

I had a feeling that the heavy emphasis on live broadcasting, twittering and blogging during conferences would have a downside.

One attendee has had it and I can understand why.

Even the best social networking tools have their limits. And that limit seems to be reached when, instead of networking and speaking to the people in front of you, you’re “networking” and “speaking” to the people who are not.

After reading this post, an absurd thought came to me. How long until a conference reception with 400 attendees is completely silent because all the attendees are live blogging and twittering instead of talking to the person next to them? Heaven help us.

I’ve always thought of “social networking” as a bit of a misnomer. Sitting in front of a computer screen writing 140 character messages on Twitter or commenting on a blog or tagging photos on Facebook doesn’t feel like networking to me – and honestly, it doesn’t feel very social either. Having a beer with friends and colleagues = social. Talking shop with someone I just met at a reception = networking.

Now granted, I’m a conference organizer, so “old-fashioned” meetups with people is how I believe “real” social networking takes place. So I had to laugh today when I read a blog post that had the following line:

“Twitter has been down for about an hour – how are you spending the time?”

As if Twitter was the only way to spend time and finding other things to do was a challenge! Has it really gotten that bad for some people?

If every website and email server worldwide went down for several hours during a weekday, I might actually be wondering myself how to spend that time. Picking up the phone and making a few calls would probably be the answer. But a single site?

Twitter is either brilliant or the enemy of true human interaction (and productivity, for that matter). In the meantime, for some of you it seems that Twitter is the Blue Pill.

“Content wants to be free” and other scary phrases seem to rear their ugly head every so often. This week, the discussion focused around whether content is becoming so easy to get and make that it is becoming worthless.

The bottled water analogy fits perfect here. Tap or drinking fountain water is free and available everywhere. Yet bottled water sales continue to soar because of:

a) Convenience – bringing a bottle of water with me means I don’t have to search around or stop to find tap water
b) Higher Quality – ok this is probably more perception than reality, but people pay for bottled water because it tastes better and is perceived to be more pure because it is from a “trusted” source. (For me, I buy it because I wonder what’s been rinsed out or cleaned out at the drinking fountain that I’m about to put my face in.)

Both of these apply directly to content. If someone has created content that saves me time because I don’t have to research and aggregate the information myself, that’s convenience and I’ll definitely buy it. If someone has created a high-quality piece of content that took a great deal of work to put together, it’s going to be higher in quality than something someone put together for free – and I’m likely to buy it.

Yes, more and more content will be available for free, but it means a lot of garbage will be available as well. The more researched and more work put into a piece of content, the more value it has to the customer and the more likely they are to open their wallets for it – that will never change.

All this is to say, don’t shy away from creating content you can charge for just because you hear “digital content has no value.” Anyone who says so likely wouldn’t pay for anything anyway. Concentrate on the audience that wants convenience or wants higher quality and you can always make money with content.

Videos of kids breaking their arms on skateboards on YouTube = free

Video series on step-by-step methods to raise capital for a business from a 25-year VC exec: $

For alternative (read: wrong) views: see here and here.

You know who you are. Always talking about how content should “free”, “open” and “transparent.” Conversations should be available anywhere, with everyone having equal ability to comment, discuss and feel valued. Anything behind a “walled garden” that can’t be re-mixed, mashed-up and re-purposed should be frowned upon – even ignored. Copyright? Schmopyright- I use the most liberal version of Creative Commons because I want people to join my campfire discussion and anything that limits that can’t be good….right?

Wait a minute – a site called Shyfter is grabbing my feed and allowing people to comment on my post outside my blog? You mean, a discussion I started could actually fizzle on my blog, but take off somewhere else? They can’t do that! My Creative Commons license says they….wait a minute. They give attribution and there aren’t ads around the content so they aren’t using it for commercial purposes. Hey, that’s not fair!

So I guess all the talk about open, free and transparent is great – until someone takes content of yours and uses it to build their site.

You can’t have it both ways, folks. If you really believe in all that open, free and transparent baloney, don’t whine when your content is taken and a discussion about it is had elsewhere.

This post, like everything else on this blog: Copyright © 2008 TNC New Media. All rights reserved. And proud of it.

I’ve been thinking about this subject all week and it’s starting to bother me.

In the “old days” anyone who was famous in the media had the big bucks that naturally accompanied that fame. But these days, there seems to be a whole lot of folks that are “Internet famous” because of blogging, podcasting, Twitter, flickr, etc. and yet need to ask their audience for donations in order to buy a better microphone. It’s a bizarre and ironic result of the ability for anyone and everyone to start producing content and gather an audience.

Sure, there’s a great deal of talk about how one can leverage fame into fortune with speaking gigs, book deals, TV appearances and jobs with Fortune 500 companies. But how many people have actually turned their fame into real dollars? Not many, simply because great content creators often aren’t always great marketers. You can say that great content will open doors all by itself, but in reality it just doesn’t work that way.

Twitter, blogs, podcasts and new media in general have created a wave of “famous” people – people with a “wealth” of attention and inbound links, but can’t pay their bills at the end of the month. Worse yet, some seem to think that if you do find a way to make your living successfuly, you’ve “sold out” and are no longer true to your audience. That’s a shame and it needs to change.

The “link” and “attention” may be the currency of the Internet, but until someone can show me how to pay my mortgage by linking to my bank once a month, that just doesn’t fly with me.

I hope it’s one of the many conversations we can all have at the New Media Expo this August. Feel free to comment here to get the conversation started.

I’ve had several conversations with prospective advertisers this week for TraderInterviews.com. TI is our site for online investors that has a podcast, marketplace directory of resources and Digg-like message board. This site happens to attract a pretty tech-savvy group of visitors because many are trading their own stock accounts online and are “veterans” of using the Internet for everything in their life. As such, it we have thousands of listeners to the podcast who subscribe to the RSS feed and rarely visit the site because they get the content via iTunes or another aggregator.

We insert our sponsor’s banners in the RSS feed, so impressions isn’t the problem. Issues arise when I tell a potential advertiser a numbers of visitors and RSS subscribers because they then go over to Alexa and see that our ranking doesn’t really reflect that same number. I know, I know – we can go on forever about how Alexa isn’t really that accurate, yet lots of folks use it.

It’s almost enough for me to turn off the RSS feed and force people to come to the site to get the content. Almost. But then we’d lose the iTunes folks and I can’t afford to alienate that group. Not to mention the fact that it wouldn’t technically be a podcast anymore.

So we’re stuck in a tough place here. I want our RSS feed to be popular – but not too popular…

Any and all suggestions are welcome.