If you’ve been waiting for a local event to help you learn more about blogging, greatly improve your blogging skills, or to effectively use blogs in your business–your wait is over! Blog Indiana 2008 is a 2-day conference on blogging and social media happening at the IUPUI Campus Center in Indianapolis. If you are new at blogging, a seasoned veteran, or want to learn the best ways to harness the power of blogging in your business, you will not want to miss this conference.
Split into three general categories (Basics, General, and Business), Blog Indiana has something for everyone. The best part is you can attend sessions in any category throughout the conference. With amazing local talent such as Chris Baggott, Jennifer Wagner, Bil Browning, Sarah Robbins, Scott Abel, Ruth Holladay, and many others. Topics covered will include legal issues, corporate blogging, brand consistency, building readership, making money with blogging, politics and blogging, and much more. Check out the sessions page for the complete list.
The conference is taking place at the IUPUI Conference Center in Indianapolis on August 16-17th. This is the first local conference like this and it looks like it will be a very useful and memorable event. Over 25 sessions featuring some great local talent, networking with hundreds of other local bloggers all for $49 makes this a conference you won’t want to miss.
If you register using the special discount code BLOGDISC, you’ll get 15% knocked off the price!
Check out the conference website for more info.
Hope to see you there in August!
For some reason, I tend to be fascinated with other people’s business cards. I love seeing how creative people can be in such a small amount of space with such a specific purpose. I never seem to be happy enough with the business cards I design for myself and am considering a redo sometime soon. I thought I’d share one of the websites I came across that gives some amazing examples of simple, stunning, and memorable business card designs that should give anyone a creative kick in the pants.
36 Cool Business Cards You Should’ve Seen
Here is a photo I took while on my honeymoon. We came upon these colorful birds shortly after I had a hamburger with a pineapple slice on it for the first time. Delicious!
Sell photos on photrade | By noah
Sell photos on photrade | By noah
I’m applying a new theme and tweaking. This should look better later this week. Just want to settle on a design so I can just worry about the blogging part of blogging. You know… blogging.
Oy… I still need to implode wpstar.com. Maybe I’ll freeze time tonight and do it then. 
If you find yourself having difficulty blogging regularly, I’ve found that sometimes the key is to make the technical part of the act of blogging easier and more convenient. Integrating the ability to blog into applications or websites you normally use can not only make blogging easier, but encourage it.
flickr
My favorite photo sharing website makes it very easy to make a blog post using either one of your photos or someone else’s that is marked as reusable. At the bottom of the “Extending flickr” tab of the “Your Account” page there is a section to add details about your blog (or blogs). If you’ve never done this before, read the simple directions to set things up properly for your type of blog and you’re all set. Once you’ve added at least one blog, a new “Blog This” button will appear above the photos you look at on flickr. Clicking on this button lets you write a blog post about that photo and post it (and the photo) to your blog all from within flickr.com. Once your done, you’re right back to looking at photos on flickr.
Google Docs
I’ve been using Google Docs since it was called Writely and I love it. I store all kinds of information in Docs and having access to it from any computer is very convenient. Today, however, was the first time I noticed that the “Share” button also allows you to post a document as a blog post directly to your blog. There is a similar set up process like flickr and then your able to post. If you already use Google Docs, this is just another reason to keep using it. If not, using Google Docs in this way can allow for more structured storage of drafts (using folders), a more robust WYSIWYG layout interface for your blog posts, versioning and collaborative sharing/writing of your blog posts–to name a few reasons.
There are other great tools that let you interact with your blog such as Windows Live Writer and ScribeFire, which I’ll cover in a future post.
I’ve been playing around with the publisher tools for 4INFO.net and have put together a convenient way to search the “twit-o-sphere” for a keyword via your cell phone using a text message.
4INFO is a text messaging information service that lets you request and subscribe to a wide range of information from various publishers via your cell phone. I’ve signed up as a publisher and have reserved the keyword: TSCAN.
Here’s how it works:
Send an SMS/text message to 44636 in this format: TSCAN <keyword>
For example, if I sent a text message to 44636 with the message:
TSCAN obama
I would get back a short menu of the most recent “tweets” with the name “obama” in them. I could then reply to that message with the corresponding menu number to see the entire “tweet.” Seem confusing? Give it a try! It really works.
I have no idea if this is useful to anyone, but just thought it was a fun way to learn about 4INFO’s publisher services.
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