Everyone’s talking about it (well all the people in a particular geeky subset), there’s going to be a web 2.0 conference here in Toronto in early May.

We share a common fascination and enthusiasm for what’s happening now on the Web and in blogging, and are eager to find a way to showcase Toronto and bring smart, interested people here from elsewhere to join our community for what we hope will be a rousing and stimulating exploration of Web 2.0.

I’ll be very interested to see how this plan pans out. There has been a lot of talk recently (here and here for example) about Toronto being off the curve when it comes to all this 2.0 stuff, events like this can only help.

Personally I have a feeling that Toronto’s, and in general Canada’s, lack of prominence in the ‘web 2.0′ world is not because there aren’t cool people here doing cool things, it’s just because we don’t make so much noise about it (for better or worse, probably both in fact). Reminds me of a discussion I heard about art, that there’s an implicit assumption that art out of New York is better and more important just because of where it’s from. There seems to be almost the reverse syndrome for tech stuff in Toronto, and maybe that’s not all bad.

I’ve written before about the benefits of blogging (here and here) to professionals and business. One particular benefit of blogging can be building authority and trust (in so far as trust can be built in a non-personal relationship anyway).

Since the holidays (and my way-off-the-early-adopter-curve acquisition of an iPod) I’ve been listening to quite a few podcasts*. One particular thing has struck me about podcasts, and that is how much more personal and ‘real’ it feels to hear someone’s thoughts spoken in their own voice compared to the relatively inexpressive words on a screen method. Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders podcast on productivity is a good example of this, in the past I’ve infrequently visited the 43 Folders blog, but I have now taken to listening to their podcast avidly.

There are several reasons I’m a fan, I like the tone, humour and length of the 43 Folders podcasts. But from the important thing about this from a professional perspective is the boost that podcasting has given the podcast’s producer, Merlin, in my awareness and respect (and I would assume the same has happened for many other listeners too). The point is, he had a good blog but it was the added intimacy (at least apparent intimacy) and novelty of a podcast that really made me take notice. Of course in the world of marketting getting people to take notice is pretty crucial, so this may be worth noting, perhaps I’ll even give it a go myself.

* What’s a podcast? A podcast is technically little more that a chunk of audio (often amateur produced and talk-based) that through some technical stuff (RSS and the like) automagically arrives on your iPod (or other MP3 audio player) as each new ‘episode’ is published. Kind of like radio on demand combined with the ease of publishing approaching that of a blog.

I’ve written before about the importance of usability, but here’s a useful list of guidelines for anyone interested in usability for blogs.
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I have written before about how blogging can be a useful way to build reputation as an expert, and through that reputation build business. Recently I came across a concrete example that shows how this can work in the real world.
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One common reason for businesses to blog is to build authority in their market. In a sense this authority building excercise is like giving away free trials to potential customers, by writing often and well about topics relevant to your market you hope to gain attention and eventually customers.
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It’s just what it says on the box, a blogging conference that takes place in Vancouver. The 2006 event has just been announced, with some luck I’ll be able to make it to this one.
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I have been intending to write a post on blog writing style for a while now but have been letting it slip behind other priorities. To be honest there’s a reason for my not having got around to this post yet, because I suspect that once I publish the guidelines on how to write for a blog it will be apparent that I’m not quite there myself.
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RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is one of those simple ideas that has the potential to make a big impact, think email.

RSS is simply a standard for publishing special web pages, called RSS feeds. Because all RSS feeds follow particular standards they can be processed by programs called aggregators. An aggregator, or feed reader, is a tool that takes a list of different feeds that you want to keep track of, your subscribed feeds, and presents you with all the content that’s new from your subscriptions.
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It’s an intuitive concept that a potential client who feels that they have a relationship with your organization is more likely to cross over into becoming an actual client than one who doesn’t feel that connection. A blog can be one way of creating that connection to potential clients.
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The term blog is a contraction of weblog, not that weblog is much more descriptive. A blog is simply a type of website, the definitions of what exactly a blog is vary, but there are some features which are common across most blogs.
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