As you may have read here, last Thursday and Friday we attended the Blog Business Summit (BBS).  I decided not to live blog it or publish daily dispatches largely because other folks were doing such a great job of that, but also because I like to have some time to digest material prior to actually commenting on it.  Sometimes I think that something is really awesome or totally stinks and then a few days later I find myself revising my opinion.

In any case, I truly enjoyed my time at BBS.  There were some crazy interesting people there and everyone was willing to have a free exchange of ideas, talk through some interesting scenarios and get to know each other.  Here are some of my impressions...

Highlights

• Getting a chance to catch up with Robert and Maryam.  They seemed so happy and were very cute vibing off each other during their “10 Way to a Killer Blog” presentation.
• Meeting and having really interesting conversations with Jory Des Jardins from BlogHer, Ariel Stallings from Jobster and Randy Stewart.  I was hoping to get a chance to talk with Karen Wickre from Google and Nicki Dugan from Yahoo! since they are both running corporate blogs (our passion) but, alas, we did not connect.  Maybe offline? :0)
• Ben Edwards from IBM and his keynote on "Branding in the Age of YouTube" and his erudite comment that how we use social media to interact is fundamentally changing the way that we create, share and respond to information.
• Elisa Camahort who, during the "Building Online Communities" session, made the comment that growing a community is about speaking, listening and responding.  Right on.
• Jason Calacanis telling us during his keynote that if "you are not on the blogging A-list you suck".  Dude, it's all in how you define A-list.
• Huge props to the BBS team! You did an amazing job organizing this event and from my view point it seemed to run without a hitch.   
• The food was choice.  There was a very hefty continental breakfast, snacks mid-morning, lunch, and mid-afternoon snacks as well.  Also a steady supply of drinks and a variety of choices for those who were vegetarians.  Not to mention that the cocktail hour nibblets on Thursday were plenty for a whole meal.  Yum!

Lowlights

• I would have liked to have seen two separate tracks at the conference.  One for beginning bloggers and another for more experienced individuals.  Often times I found myself sitting through a session even though it wasn’t that relevant.
• Though many of the presentation titles and descriptions were very pertinent, I found that often times presenters seemed to be less organized and speaking very informally or on the fly about their topics.  In some cases, it wasn’t until someone from the audience asked a question (e.g. so how do you build an online community?), that the topic was actually covered.  Unfortunately, this was usually within the last 10 minutes of the session.
• To that end, I’m used to seeing fairly formal presentations of the type that Ben Edwards, Scoble and John Batelle gave.  They were prepared, focused and on topic.  I got way more out of these sessions then some of the others we went to.
• More variety in the presenters.  The same people seemed to present over and over again and while I have a deep respect for these people, I would loved to hear more from folks in different industry or with different experience.

Suprises

• Interesting to see that many of the attendees were there to determine how blogging could enhance their business and, to that end, put a strategy around using this form of “new media”.  Why is this surprising?  Because I view blogging as such a grass-roots effort that defies the traditional definitions and metrics that marketing often places on such initiatives.  Blogging is now part of a larger scope of this thing called new media which has it’s roots in social networking and transparency and a whole business is now spawning from this “industry”. 
• That there is actually an established (well, pretty much) industry around new media, new marketing, commercial social media, and emerging media.  I have A LOT to say about this, more then this post can take... 

Silly Gripes

• Three words people.  Cell.  Phone.  Etiquette.  It didn’t matter that there were copious announcements requesting people to silence, or dare I say it, shut off your phone.  Nor did it seem to trigger any reminders when fellow attendees blogged to no end about annoying cell phones going off during presentations.  People still managed to leave their phones on.  My favorite was the triumphant circus chorus that rung out during one of the keynotes.  Priceless.
  
• Two words people.  Notebook.  Etiquette.  Okay, maybe I shouldn’t so much complain about this, but I actually found it really quite distracting (disclosure; I didn’t bring mine because it’s broken).  I know it’s your perogative to determine if you are going to pay attention during a conference or use your notebook to take notes, but dude, there were some points during the presentation where I could barely hear the presenter over the din of people slamming away on their keyboards.  The more interesting the presenter?  The less keyboard noise.  I have only one conclusion to draw there…