The following is a summary recollection of what happened at BlogWorld 2009 in Las Vegas. In this post, I will look at the activities that took place in the last days of BlogWorld.


A lot of activity took place during the first day of BlogWorld, but the next couple of days really picked up as there were several more keynotes that took the form of panel discussions and brought out a few well-known celebrities to talk about why they are embracing social media and blogging.


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The second day kicked off with the CEO of Technorati, Richard Jalichandra, giving a spirited talk about the state of the blogosphere which typically gives people an idea on where things stand in terms of adoption and the overall industry. After Jalichandra spoke, the keynote continued with an invigorating panel discussion on the future of journalism, moderated by Brian Solis and featured CNN anchor Don Lemon, NYU Journalism Department professor Jay Rosen, the chief operating officer of Current TV, Joanna Drake Earl and radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt. This was a rather spirited discussion with all on the panelists pretty much supporting social media & blogging and basically stating that old school journalism needs to evolve in order to survive.


Breaking news from this keynote came from Don Lemon who announced that throughout the conference, they were going to try and break the Guinness Book of World Records for the biggest viral message across any social network and at the same time help to beat cancer. The plan was simple…attendees needed to simply add the hashtag #beatcancer to all their tweets, blog posts, videos, etc and then through monitoring done by Radian6, we would know before the end of the conference whether or not #beatcancer had become a world record. Well…it did…and it raised some money for cancer research as well.


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The rest of the day was filled with panel discussions on a variety of topics, including assessing ROI in social media, how to build and market an iPhone application, the good and the bad about social media, the ethics of mommy blogging, etc. What really was inspiring was the fact that BlogWorld had adapted to the growing changes in the industry so that they had tracks specifically for mommy bloggers and for military bloggers as well – which have grown remarkably over the past few years. It all wrapped up with perhaps a rather ecstatic keynote given by podcaster and host of TWiT.tv, Leo Laporte.


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The third day began again with Brian Solis moderating yet another panel…this time he had quite a few celebrities with him including, actor Anthony Edwards (”ER”, “Top Gun” and “Revenge of the Nerds”), Robin Antin from the Pussycat Dolls, DJ Matt Goss, and successful record producer and artist Jermaine Dupri. The talk was all about how being a celebrity has changed with the world of social media. For Anthony Edwards, it has helped him make a difference with people in another country as he is trying to build a hospital or a school for children in Africa. Matt Goss has embraced social media in a way that allows him to get fan feedback on his records and also to help be more charitable back in England. This is also the same way with Jermaine Dupri, but he also has a affinity for looking online and potentially scouting out new talent for his record label.


After the keynote panel, attendees were dispersed throughout the convention center looking for yet more sessions to go to and some were really interesting including one about listening by Jeremiah Owyang and even a panel on influence with Tristan Harris and Micah Baldwin. If you were interested as well, a travel-related path was available on the last day talking about the relevancy of social media with tourism and hospitality.


It all wrapped up with the closing keynote given by AllTop founder and author of Reality Check, Guy Kawasaki who brought on stage Chad Vadar and some other people in what could have been one of the funniest things to see at BlogWorld this year.


All in all, I really enjoyed being at BlogWorld. It’s a great place to network and meet old and new friends while getting some insights into how blogging & social media should be done.


Photo Credit: All photos shown here were taken by Kenneth Yeung.




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