Search and Blogging Reporters Forum from Pubcon 2007

by Michael Dorausch

Among my personally top-ranked sessions I attended at this past week’s Pubcon 2007 conference in Las Vegas was a Search and Blogging Reporters Forum that featured a panel of blog and media experts.

The panel featured three big names in the industry of blogging and search (Andy Beal, Lee Odden, Rand Fishkin) and it was moderated by Michael McDonald, the current managing editor for WebProNews.

I managed to get this photograph of all four gentlemen together, just before the morning search and blogging presentation got started.

As an editor for Planet Chiropractic News (nearly 10 years now) I found this session to be one of the most valuable of the week’s panel discussions. It was educational to get the speakers perspectives on different types of media blogs and how the information was being utilized.

The group talked about how journalists are increasingly looking to blogs for information that can be used in mainstream news articles. Some numbers were thrown out as to percentages of how many journalists were now using blogs as their primary source of information for news article creation. During the discussion Rand Fishkin mentioned that he had received an e-mail earlier in the morning from a major tech magazine reporter. The reporter was doing some fact checking on a recent blog post and they wanted to get more information.

During the panel they talked about A-list bloggers and shared some examples of newcomers to the blogosphere that have quickly developed reputations in their niche areas. A blog by Andy Beard was mentioned as an example of one that has rapidly added new subscribers and gained much popularity in the area of online marketing.

They discussed their own blogs and talked about the different ways users interacted with them. As an example it was pointed out that Andy Beal’s Internet news site (Marketing Pilgrim) creates a lot of industry-specific content, but users don’t typically leave many comments. In comparison, Rand Fishkin’s SEOmoz blog posts were shown to often receive many user comments, sometimes numbering near a hundred. My take away there was that audiences viewed each of the blogs differently, even if they were frequent readers of both (like myself). While the first is an important source of news information, the second engages a community that responds to posts on a consistent basis.

The roundtable discussion was live blogged (an incredible talent) by Lisa Barone, so check this out to get her in-depth coverage of the blogging forum.

Photo to the left is of Lisa Barone, Jane Copeland (of SEOmoz), and Tamar Weinberg. These ladies make attending Internet conferences much easier as they are typically live blogging and making detailed notes which appear in summary posts.

Something I thought would be of value for all bloggers would be to provide contact information for media and journalists, so that one could be easily accessible for quotes, interviews, and source information that may be valuable to a journalist preparing a story for a major media publication or television news broadcast.

I suppose it’s time to update my own contact information.