Earthling

Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.

I had an excellent time last week at the BlogPhiladelphia conference and in the short time I had to see some of Philly itself. In this entry I wanted to provide a short wrap-up of the session I led and some links, and then in the next one I'll list out some of the participants I met at the conference. Needless to say if you are not into the nuts and bolts of corporate blogging, don't worry; I'll return to more general Earthling stuff shortly.

Thank you to the large number of people who participated in the Blogging and Business session. With such a big crowd, I was initially concerned that having a real conversation would be difficult, but the participants more than overcame that challenge even when it came to figuring out seating arrangements. I had made a list beforehand of possible discussion topics, and conversation naturally came around to each of them in turn. Here's some of what we covered:

• Do you/how do you cover competitors?
  
• How do blogging and PR departments relate at a big company?
  
• How do you answer the "return on investment" question?
  
• Internal blogs, wikis, other conversation tools
  
• As a customer/user, when have you turned to a corporate blog to get information or solve a problem?
  
• What are some of the more interesting new technologies you've seen corporate blogs use?

And here are links to a few of the stories we discussed and some that relate to corporate blogging in general. If there are any others you'd like me to include or if you wrote about the session and I didn't happen to see your blog entry, please send that stuff along or drop me a comment:

• The Hugh MacLeod sketch from 2005 I led off with that sums up the overall world of corporate blogging to me.
  
• Where I recently came across the sketch -- an exchange between Penny Arcade and a Microsoft blogger about corporate blogging.
  
• The initial Google Health Advertising Blog entry by Lauren Turner about Sicko, and the follow-up from Lauren and Missy Krasner representing the larger Google context. Here's Matt Cutts' take as well, with some observations about corporate blogging in general.
  
• The Lights of Liberty show site -- we discussed how the small staff of the show might get better engaged with social media, blogs, and their potential audience online.
  
• Benet Wilson's Towers and Tarmacs blog at AviationWeek
  
• Valeria Maltoni's thoughts on the session and the conference over all
  
• Additional thoughts from Allen Stern at CenterNetworks.