What a week. It's Saturday morning now I'm on my way to the VIP wine tasting - wine dinner excursion. There wasn't room for me to fly to this on the Greenpoint technologies Lear jet, but, I'm flying back tonight on it, so pictures will be take (blogging from a plane!). This is going to be one of the last posts here for me on the Tucows Blog. So if you'd like to keep reading my posts on other (but still related) topics, please come on over to A View from the Isle.

So, how was the conference, you might wonder. I don't go to that many conferences, three or so a year usually, but I have a great affection for BBS as you know. BBS seems to be the conference where I take giant leaps forward in my career. BBS is an interesting conference. There are people coming to learn how to get their business blog going, some to learn how to make their business blog better, others are already bloggers and here to just connect with each other.

While there are always good sessions and some not as good sessions, overall I think the sessions this go round where the best thus far. Being the third BBS, Steve et al have figured out what the range of people are looking for, and this really showed. Besides the two sessions where I was speaking (which were of course spectacular ), I really like Jason Calacanis' keynote, John Batelle's keynote and the small business blogging sessions. Yes, I liked all the others too, don't feel left out, those where just my favourites. The keynotes where interesting just because John and Jason were interesting to listen to and had interesting insights. Might not 100% agree with 100% of the talk, but it was still entertaining. The small biz blogging session was so tremendously important … I wish it had been in the larger room and not the smaller side room. SMBs (small to mid-size businesses) can leverage blogs and blogging far easier than large companies and, IMHO, reap larger rewards faster. SMBs are more nibble and can level the playing field versus larger competitors. It is not hard or unheard of (actually it's rather common) for a small biz to lap a large biz on search engines by leveraging blogs.

As the sessions were wrapping up I had a chance to chat with Steve Broback about what BBS07 might look like. One idea thus far is to make it more of a community of business bloggers, therefore people already blogging. Sure there will always people who will still need to get their business blog going, but I have two ideas for that. One is, of course, the pre-conference workshops. I'd make them much more hands on and maybe more like small group classes. Second, might be for newbie bloggers to have a "blogging buddy" a speaker or attendee who is already an established blogger to just keep tabs on them through the conference and offer insight to the new folks.

I think this has been a watershed BBS. It's the third one, business blogging isn't a new concept or something that I think needs a strong arm sell. I think we need to work on refinements and enhancements, but the overall stuff is all set, IMHO.

I'm going to be covering the special post-conference event I was invited to attend on my blog.

Tags: bbs, bbs06, blog business summit, conference wrap-up

Posted on Monday, October 30th, 2006 at 5:11 pm by Tucows.
Filed under: Conference Coverage.
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