Coming out of the weekend the most often asked question was, "Will there be a BlogOrlando 2007?" At this moment, yes. Of course that could change if something drastic happens, but for now I'll look to plan a similar event in September of next year.

Hopefully we can build on the momentum and great attendance we had this past weekend. How about you? Are you up for BlogOrlando 2007? What types of sessions should we include? Do you like the one-day format of if we had the interest would you go two days? How about the venue, did you like Rollins?

Posted by Josh Hallett at 04:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Here are a few links to some attendee posts about BlogOrlando:

Drew's posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Chris Heuer's quick recap with more to come.

David Parmet says we've reached the point of no return.

Chris Scott begins his 4-part recap including the planning and the sessions.

Gretchen Moran's recap and Martie's brief remarks.

Ryan Price shares some quick thoughts and quotes.

The Masked Blogger shares his thoughts on Orlando MetBlog as well as a few posts on his blog: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Disney guru John Frost posted a few recaps as well: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

There are a few more coming in each day. I'll post another update in a few days.

Posted by Josh Hallett at 04:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Update: John has the video posted.

Andrew from Evoca has some audio files from the BlogOrlando sessions. E-mail him to receive access to the files.

John Rife also shot a bunch of video and is busy away editing it together. As soon as he has some content posted we'll let you know.

Posted by Josh Hallett at 04:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

An overall thanks to everybody that attended the event this past weekend. I think things went off relatively well. We had a few wifi and power issues that were quickly resolved. As with any event there were quite a few people that said they were coming to certain portions but never showed. That threw our dinner counts a bit off.

On Friday we hald almost 80 people attend the sessions at BlogOrlando. I think for Orlando/Florida that's great. I welcome your feedback and comments.

Now on to the list of folks I need to thank.

Jeni, Anne Marie and the rest of the gang at Rollins' PR Department
Chris and all the other guys from BlogZerk & Red Rocket
Jerermy from Crawl Space Media

Bob, Dave, David, Tommy, Joey, Andrea, Mark, Andrew, John, Vlad and Chris.....thanx for leading some great sessions.

Without the help of these folks it would have been just a few of us in a Starbucks talking things over.

Posted by Josh Hallett at 04:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Disney was nice enough to host a huge fireworks show for the end of BlogOrlando. (Not Really)

Over the next few days I'll be posting some wrap-ups and links to other resources.

Posted by Josh Hallett at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I decided to bag going to EPCOT today. Only a few folks had RSVP'd and most of them didn't even make it to the event on Friday so I figured it would be OK to skip things.

Posted by Josh Hallett at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Saturday saw a few of the BlogOrlando folks heading to the Magic Kingdom to enjoy the park and each other's company....and of course take pictures. Here are a few favorites:

You can view photos all over the place.

Posted by Josh Hallett at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Andrea Werkerle has some links from her legal session on her blog. Go check it out.

Posted by Josh Hallett at 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you didn't get your bag-o-goodies at registration this morning, check back with one of us at the registration table during one of the breaks.

Posted by Chris Scott at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

BlogOrlando will be kicking off shortly. I am just running some final errands this morning on the way to Rollins College. See you soon!

We had a great dinner last night, of course there are plenty of photos available.

Posted by Josh Hallett at 06:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Just a quick reminder that you are on your own for breakfast/coffee in the morning. There are two close options for your fix though. There is a Panera Bread right next to campus at 118 West Fairbanks Avenue (Google Map). The closest Starbucks is just a few blocks away at 400 Park Ave (Google Map)

If you're not coming to dinner tonight, we'll see you by 9 in the morning tomorrow.

Posted by Josh Hallett at 03:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I created a Flickr group for BlogOrlando: http://www.flickr.com/groups/blogorlando Anybody can join and upload photos. Of course you can also tag your photos blogorlando

Posted by Josh Hallett at 08:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We've been receiving a number of registration in the past few days. As of this morning we have almost reached the capacity of our venue, which is 88 people. When I first began organizing this event back in July/August I hoped to draw around 40-50 people, so this is great.

I plan to take down the registration page late this afternoon just because I won't be able to process them after a certain point today. Does that mean you can't come? No, of course not.

But just realize that if you show up on Friday morning without registering you might be standing in an aisle with a hand-drawn name tag :-)

Posted by Josh Hallett at 07:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I'll be spending most of the day on Thursday doing some final prep work for BlogOrlando. If you need to get a hold of me, feel free to e-mail me or call my cell at 863-258-7338.

Many of the folks who are traveling in from out of the area will be arriving at various times during the day tomorrow. So, for those of you coming in from out of the area, Welcome to Orlando.

I'll be linking up with Andrea and David in the afternoon. We'll most likely be at Panera Bread on Lake Eola. If you're in town early feel free to join us.

Our last count has almost 40 folks coming to dinner at Kobe tomorrow night. See you then!

Posted by Josh Hallett at 06:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Chris Heuer has posted a great intro for the final session of the day. We plan on wrapping up the day by taking a look forward to where this social media world is leading us and what are the possible benefits/drawbacks.

Head on over to the Social Media Club blog to read through some introductory thoughts.

Posted by Josh Hallett at 06:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I received the following intro to the Corporate Blogging session from Dave Coustan:

Corporate blogs take many forms and aim at achieving any number of objectives. Although it’s hard to draw generalizations across all of the different forms and use cases, the idea of a company speaking through a blog usually brings with it some questions in common. What does it mean for a company to have a blog? In what department should a company’s blog live? How are official, company-sponsored blogs different from other kinds of blogs? How is a blogger (or commenter) different from a company spokesperson? What complications do corporate blogs introduce into the way traditional companies are accustomed to doing business and engaging with the public? And what other practices are there to think about outside of running a corporate blog itself?

I’ve been at EarthLink for about a year, and created Earthling (http://blogs.earthlink.net ) back in January as “an official EarthLink blog”. I’d like to start the discussion with a quick summary of what Earthling is and how it evolved at EarthLink. Depending on the interest in the room, we could focus the discussion on my experiences blogging within and for a company, or more generally about corporate blogging as a whole. I think any grab bag of the following topics would be interesting. Drop a comment if there’s any one of these you know you’d like to see covered or have any other suggestions:

- The practicals of day-to-day corporate blogging – how does it work at EarthLink?
- Lessons learned at Earthling – what’s worked, what hasn’t, what direction is it headed
- Do some models work better than others?
- What should an employee blogging policy look like?
- Who should blog at your company?
- What common issues does a company usually grapple with when it decides to blog?
- What’s the role of the readers of a corporate blog, and is it any different from other types of blogs?

Posted by Josh Hallett at 06:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

It's a conference but then again it's an unconference so what do I wear? Just like other blogger events this is a casual event, if I was an attendee I would be wearing jeans and a basic shirt. Since I am 'hosting' the event I'll probably be wearing khakis and a shirt. How does that translate to women? I'm not 100% sure, business casual, casual??? Dress comfortable and enjoy yourself.

I will say though, if you show up in a suit, you might look a bit out of place.

Posted by Josh Hallett at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

I received an e-mail from somebody that was unfamiliar with the unconference format, they wondered if there was a 'catch' to this free event?

Thinking about it more, it does make sense. Many times financial planners or timeshare reps will hold a 'free' seminar to 'pitch' their services to the attendees. Well there are no pitches or hidden agendas, everything is out in the open.

The next question was how could I make money on this event? Simple answer, I'm not.

One of the great things about an event like this is that the costs are relatively low. I am very fortunate that the Rollins College PR department is helping cover half the cost of the facility rental which is $300. So there I am out of pocket $150. The wifi comes free with the facility, so no cost there. I need to buy some extension cords and power strips for the venue, but that's around $50. There is no breakfast planned since we start at 9 am, and lunch is on your own in the Winter Park area. There will be some basic printing/copying costs for the handouts and badges, but nothing huge.

In reality it's mostly my time that I have invested in the event. I am also fortunate to have two great helpers in Chris Scott from BlogZerk and Jeremy Harriington from Crawl Space Media. The two of them have provided hours of volunteer support and design services.

The only other real costs are the small deposits I had to put down on for the two dinners. When you tell a restaurant you're bringing 40/70 people they want some sort of guarantee.

To be honest, the restaurant reservations were the biggest issue I had. Since the event is free we could get a number of people that register and then don't show up, after all it's not costing them any money. I did have an idea to handle this though. I considered charging a basic registration fee, say $50, that would be returned to you when you showed up. With that process, the event would still be free, but it would make sure that those that registered showed up. It might be a good solution for other free events. What are your thoughts?

Posted by Josh Hallett at 06:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Brian Oberkirch has just let me know that he is going to be unable to make it to Orlando. One of those pesky paying clients requires him to be in California at the end of this week. We have removed his Hurricanes & Disasters session from the schedule and made some other tweaks. You can view the new schedule here.

What I did was extend the morning tracks from 30 minutes each to 45 minutes each. The small amount of time in the morning we have left over will be used to introduce participants to the unconference format, since many of the attendees have never been to one.

Posted by Josh Hallett at 03:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We toyed around with the idea of creating a wiki for this, but that's too much work :-) So here is an open thread for any travel related items. Feel free to leave a comment about when you're flying in, where you're staying, if you're looking for a carpool from the airport or to one of the events, etc...

Posted by Josh Hallett at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

How do I get to Rollins College and where should I park? Your best bet for parking is the Rollins parking garage. Cost for parking for the day will be $8. You can download the PDF linked below for driving directions to the garage (and Rollins)

Directions to Rollins Parking Garage

You can also check out the official Rollins Campus Map in PDF format.

Posted by Josh Hallett at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This might get your geared up for next weekend.

Posted by Josh Hallett at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Vlad Mazek sent over his introduction to the Video Blogging session:

Using Video to Connect, Inform or Sell

Join us for a 30 minute crash course in video blogging from getting started to best practice. Then talk and listen about how it can make sense for you both personally and professionally. Compared to blogging, video blogging is very much in its infancy and the only limit is your creativity. We will discuss the costs involved in creation, editing recommendations, publishing options, promotion and communication.

Posted by Josh Hallett at 02:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you're planning on blogging while attending BlogOrlando we would just ask that you tag your posts or photos with 'blogorlando'.

I won't be able to do too much blogging during the event, so we'll be relying upon all of you to help cover the event. A day or two before the event we will set-up some aggregate feeds to collect any discussion and photos to post here.

Posted by Josh Hallett at 06:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the reasons we're having BlogOrlando at Rollins College is because they offer free wifi to all attendees. (Try to find a local venue that does that). There is one catch though. In order to use the wireless on campus the college's IT department needs to register you laptop ahead of time. If you plan on using the wifi will at the event you will need to send us your MAC address by Monday, September 18th.

What's your MAC address? It's the unique ID of your wireless card.

How do you figure out what your MAC address is? Read the two examples below.

Once you have your MAC address, e-mail me - josh@hyku.com - with the information.

Mac OSX:

Open the System Preferences application and choose Network.

In the Show: dropdown choose AirPort

If it isn't already selected click AirPort under the Show: menu. This will show you your AirPort ID--this is your MAC address and is selectable so you can select it and copy it.

Windows 2000/XP:

Click the Start button and choose Run... 

Type in cmd in the dialog box and click OK. 

In the command window, type ipconfig /all and press Enter 

In the results, you'll see something like the following:

If you have more than one adapter (most laptops have two), make sure you are looking at the one labeled for your wireless connection. The Physical Address is your MAC address. To copy this, right-click in the command window and choose Mark from the menu. Select the address and press Enter to copy it. 

Posted by Chris Scott at 03:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bob O'Malley has posted his intro for the Politics session at BlogOrlando. Head on over to O'Blog to see what Bob plans to talk about.

Posted by Josh Hallett at 02:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Don't worry registration for BlogOrlando is still open, but you will need to register by Tuesday, Sept 12th in order to receive a t-shirt. If you register after tomorrow you will not be guaranteed a t-shirt.

Sorry about that, it's just that we have to get our order in before the event.

Posted by Josh Hallett at 02:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You might remember that Andrew Bourland was at first critical of the unconference format. Well, Andrew attended his first unconference this past weekend and has posted his thoughts.

I learned a great deal in the time I was there, and hope I was useful to others as well. Not only that, despite being a dyed in the wool introvert, I ended up joining three local organizations which will help continue the learning path I’m on. It will also help me in my networking about, learning more of the right people that I should be talking to.

So Josh, you were right, I was wrong. The UnConference can in fact be a tremendous opportunity to learn more about the topics you are interested in.

I would recommend corporate bloggers seek out these venues as well to increase their knowledge on their blogging skills. They only cost you the time, energy and knowledge you put into them — which will serve to increase their value substantially.

Posted by Josh Hallett at 01:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Joey Marchy and Tommy Duncan have posted their session introductions for the Hyperlocal session they will be leading.

Tommy and I will be discussing hyperlocal blogs and the implications on the way community news is covered now and in the future. Hyperlocal blogging is sometimes used to refer to coverage of smaller events and happenings that are sometimes overlooked by mainstream media outlets. We hope to answer the question: Can bloggers cover communities more effectively than traditional media?

They have the same thing posted on both of their blogs, so go to one of them and comment away.

Posted by Josh Hallett at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jeremy Harrington is working up the design for the event badges. You can take a look below.

The final design will have the first name larger on top and will also include the URL of your site/blog (if you provided one).

Want one with your name on it? You'll need to register :-)

Posted by Josh Hallett at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Remember that one open slot we had on the session list? Well it has been filled. I am pleased to announce that John Cutter from the Orlando Sentinel will be leading a session titled, "The Media Blogs".

John is a Senior Editor at the Orlando Sentinel and oversees the Crime Blog, as well as posting frequently on the Hurricane Blog and Space Blog during shuttle launches. Using an overused phrase, John is a reporter that 'Get's It' when it comes to blogs. John will talk briefly about how the Sentinel approaches blogging and then engage the audience. What do you want from a newspaper blog? What are they doing right? What are they doing wrong?

Posted by Josh Hallett at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Andrew Odom has posted an intro for his BlogOrlando session on Tools. You know the drill...go check it out and comment away.

Right now Andrew's other presenter is TBD, but it will most likely be a combination of a few other folks that use a variety of the tools we'll talk about.

Posted by Josh Hallett at 01:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Andrea Weckerle posted an introduction to her session on Legal Issues back in July, but we'll go ahead and link to it again. Just in case you forgot.

As always, head on over to her blog and let her know the topics that interest you.

Posted by Josh Hallett at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

David Parmet has posted a quick introduction for his session on PR and Blogs over on his blog. Go check it out and tell Dave what you're hoping to learn.

Posted by Josh Hallett at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over the next two weeks I will be asking the session leaders to post some introductions about their topics. This can be done on the BlogOrlando blog or on their own personal blogs.

I encourage attendees to visit these intros and begin to comment/interact with the session leaders. The more they learn from you and what you expect from the session the better for everybody.

Posted by Josh Hallett at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have finally set the schedule for all the sessions at BlogOrlando. It's a mixture of full-attendee sessions and separate tracks. Check out the schedule page to look things over.

In the coming weeks, each of the session leaders will be posting some initial thoughts and discussion points about their topics.

Posted by Josh Hallett at 05:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After posting a few inquiries, I have head from a number of you via comments and e-mails. The consensus among you (that have voiced your opinion) is that Saturday will be Magic Kindgom day and Sunday will be EPCOT day. So to repeat:

Saturday, September 23 - Magic Kingdom
Sunday, September 24 - EPCOT

On that Saturday, the MK is open from 9 am till 9 pm. Everybody is on their own for transportation to the park, but we could arrange for some carpools from various hotels. We'll plan to meet in front of City Hall on Main Street at the Magic Kingdom at 9:30 am.

On Sunday, EPCOT is open from 9 am till 9 pm. Once again transportation is on your own. We'll plan to meet on the left side of the base of Spaceship Earth at 9:30 am.

Posted by Josh Hallett at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)