By Senior Editor Kris Smith (@croncast)

Today, as I am sure you have noticed, I'm short on my five blog posts a day by about . . . um, five. That is until now.

I've been down with a bug all day and feeling a little better thanks to a great post from Bruno Giussani on his blog Lunch Over IP. The post is titled, Tips for Conference Bloggers, and includes an incredibly insightful and well designed PDF cheat sheet.

His post from a little over two years ago holds strong today and is resonating with me enough to crank this post out. Timing is important in this case since we are beginning a new conference season with mega events like SXSW on the horizon.

I spent nearly the entire last week at CES and had my pride handed to me by this monster trade show/conference/press extravaganza. I was ill prepared for everything that the event would throw at me and approached it like an average conference. This is a mistake I won't repeat.

What I learned at CES was that there are two types of attendees: those doing business and those covering the event. Those in the first category are more concerned with parties, sales and future business relationships. Those in the latter are analyzing, comparing and framing the event for publication.

Publishing from CES is a formidable process. Most press covering the event have teams of people dedicated to gathering information and creating media needed for a final publications. This is a smart move for an event with over 100k attendees.

In addition to the excellent PDF from Giussani's post that addresses the 95% of the concerns of a blogger in 2010 there is 5% that could be added for the here and now. There are new event realities and technologies that can enhance his original thoughts.

1. MiFi is a must have for connectivity. This is especially important for Giussani's rule of blogging an even no later that 10 minutes after it has ended. Conferences don't as often have wifi available as they did back then except in a few locations like press or blogger lounges.

2. Photo/Video lighting gear. Get used to shooting in dark to minimal light and learning your cameras settings well. Check your first few shots or reel to view the quality and make corrections as needed. Much of this can be enhanced with lighting rigs that will allow you to get the shots you need when they happen . . . not when you are ready for them with white balance or aperture settings.

3. Backup workflow. You have a machine that you love and take every where with you, right? What happens when it goes down? Before the event or during you should have a backup plan for gear failure so that it doesn't destroy your workflow. Blogging an event can be difficult in the first place, but when the workflow you went into the even is disrupted it can be detrimental to timely coverage.

4. Speak to previous attendees of the events you are going to be covering. This falls under the guidelines on page 6 of the PDF of collaboration. However, this is a proactive measure before the conference begins so that you can understand what obstacles you might be up against.

5. When the authors recommend having fun, it shouldn't just be at the end of the day for parties or networking. It should be throughout the day. It is counterproductive to be worried during the day about connectivity, media fails or missed opportunities. If something happens that you're not happy with, put it in the back of your mind or write a note down for it and move on. Dwelling on something that you can't do over is to your detriment and that of your readers ro viewers.

Please head over to Bruno Giussani's blog and download the PDF that he has made available. Even if you're not blogging a conference or trade show, there is great value in these tips for any writer publishing to the web.

Image: Screen shot of the PDF cover (Bruno Giussani).

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How To: Conference Blogging is a post from: TechStartups.com

By Senior Editor Kris Smith (@croncast)

We've all had to deal with losing our most precious data photos of family, spreadsheets and the 1.5 million images of kitties being cute. I joke, but we have all been there, that moment when you know that your data is gone.

You sit crushed under the weight of the mental notes you are taking about what has been lost. Then you realize that you have a backup maybe. That it might be accessible from another computer maybe.

With a solution offered by Spare Backup there is no maybe. Their software ensures that your data is saved, it's in a format that you can recognize with icons for you applications and it is accessible in more ways than one. More than one? They offer an innovative mobile solution as well as an easily navigated online backup.

My first impressions of the mobile access and online service have been favorable. I have been able to access data backups with ease on mobile. Sure I can't restore my computer from it but without having to wait to get a new one up and running I can look at those cute kitty pictures.

As for internet access, the best feature of Spare Backup's offering isn't really the storage, it is awesome too but plays second fiddle to a masterfully designed user interface for getting to your backup data. The interface is icon driven and succeeds where most consumer backup services fail making the icons useful and descriptive for the kind of files you will find behind them.

Spare Backup offers three levels of service to customers: single pc, family pack to backup five computers to one account and a corporate package. They all offer the standard online backup to the cloud and the ability to burn the data to fixed media like CD/DVD. I'm sure if you are stealthy enough you could use another app to create an .ISO backup and send it over to an external drive.

If you're looking for a new solution for backing up your computer, take a look at Spare Backup. They have a long history of improving their software since going public in 2003. Unlike most startups, if you like the service that Spare Backup provides you can actually buy into the company, as they are publicly traded. Another funding method that we'll address in a future post.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Spare Backup and Spare Yourself Some Pain is a post from: TechStartups.com

I just looked at the baby photos of Milan being born. Back then we did something pretty cool with a service called Twittergram. We recorded his first cry. But now Twittergram seems to have gone away and with it, our baby's first cry. That was only two years ago. You can see the link there, but it doesn't work.

This isn't the first time I've noticed things online disappearing over time. My first two years of blogging are gone. Some of that was backed up by the wayback machine.

I've seen other people's blogs, or other online items go away too. Hey, quick, find some of your Tweets from just four months ago. They are all still online, but you probably can't find them. Me neither.

Or, wait until you are hacked and don't have a backup, like happened with me. I love the folks who say you should have backed up. How do you back up everything you do online? You can't. Quick, back up all your Google Docs, your Tweets, your Flickr photos and all the metadata surrounding them (comments, tags, etc), your Facebook items, etc etc. You will die trying.

I know, I've been backing up like a crazy man lately since I got hacked. What's funny is one of my brand new hard drives died. Luckily I had a backup of that. But what if I didn't?

What if my house burned down tonight? I wouldn't be able to save everything. Heck, I'd be worried about getting my family out and screw the hard drives.

So our online lives leak away.

It gets worse after you die.

You think your family will be able to save your Flickr photos? Not if you don't give them your passwords. Here's why: they won't be able to find them.

I let my Flickr Pro account lapse cause I was too lazy to put in a new credit card. I couldn't even find my old photos. Why? Because Flickr's search only shows the last few photos and they turn off the calendar and all sorts of things if you stop paying for the pro account. Yowza.

Reminds me of an interview I had with Jeremy Toeman who built a new company called Legacy Locker. But now we need to put enough cash in there to keep Flickr accounts paid up so my sons will be able to see their photos after I die.

Some best practices I've learned:

1. If you care that it stays around, use services from big companies. Google will probably stick around for a while. Twittergram? Gone.

2. Put your stuff in multiple places. Why? Because maybe Yahoo will decide to turn off the Flickr service in 10 years. So, make sure your photos go to other services.

3. Back up what you can, but that won't help long term. Quick, if your dad handed you a hard drive with 10,000 photos would you be able to find anything on there? What if you got that hard drive in 30 years? Would you be able to even look at what's on it? Remember, when I was in college my entire life was on floppy disks. I can't even read those now.

4. Print out stuff that you really want to save. I still have my trunk of photos from my childhood, but lots of my photos taken digitally over the years are gone or hard to find.

5. Use services like Legacy Locker to ensure that your kids at least will have your passwords and rights to your stuff and accounts.

Any other best practices?

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Job Decline Worst in 35 years
Many of my friends and family members have been laid off, or are having a hard time getting a job. In fact, Forbes reports that nearly 600,000 jobs were lost in Jan due to the recession, the worst since 1974 says the SF Chronicle.

Average Tech Company Layoffs? 21%
Being native to the tech industry, I'm watching Techcrunch's layoff tracker, which has a roster of 288,153 layoffs since August 08. Let's assume that Techcrunch's data is right, and focus on one of the columns listed on the report shows the percentages of layoffs per company. Being the analyst I am, I did a quick average and found out that most common percentages of layoff is 21%.

21%, this means that if you work at a tech company, and look up and down your aisle, 1/5 people you know, could be packing their boxes.

Hate Your Job? Suck It Up
After speaking with others that were thinking of leaving their jobs before Oct, they are now thinking twice, why? The competition for specific jobs is fierce, and with less compensation, people that have crappy jobs are going to suck it up, despite the fact they have to do more with less.

Got Laid Off? You've A Stigma to Overcome
I speak to a lot of CEOs in my job as an Industry Analyst, and I've been asking them where they would hire top talent from, from the existing workforce (already have a job) or those that got laid off. Each one (over 5) told me that they would still try to poach top talent from existing companies, sadly those that were laid off on first round have a stigma attached to them. In fact, some of you may be over and under qualified, and you should know the dangers and solutions.

For those that were cut in first round, I'm sensitive to your situation, you know I'm doing what I can to help those that got laid off with my survey results of those that were hired since the recession was announced.

Filtering the True Social Media Experts
So what about those that got laid off? friend and former colleague Robert Scoble suggests several tips to those who joined the mobility pool, while many make sense, he suggests that:

This means removing ANYTHING that says you are a social media expert from your Twitter account. There is no such thing and even if there were there's no job in it for you. Chris Brogan already has that job and he's not giving it up.

I disagree and agree, here's why: first of all, recognize there's a few different types of social media experts, those have have done it, and those that say they can.

Within the corporate (client) environment, it's easy to find folks that have done it, in fact, I've created a list of those within companies larger than 1000 employees that are social media strategists, or community managers. I'm a bit behind on updating the list, I'll do it soon, please carefully read the requirements before submitting.

On the vendor or agency side, this is a bit more challenging, as an client, you should ask for at least 3 case studies of success, and gauge if they are walking the talk.

However, it gets more difficult on the consultant side, why? When people get laid off, the first instinct is brand themselves a consultant for hire. As a result, anyone who has been using social media tools for personal use could brand themselves as having social media skills and experiences for corporate yet we know it's often very different.

Now, if you truly are a social media expert, and a consultant, you've likely already a book of business and you're working with clients. Therefore any employer who is seeking to hire you, and sees that you're positioning yourself as a social media consultant without a book of business or client or vendor experience will quickly see through it. That's where Scoble is right.

Key Takeaway: If you are the real deal, tout it. Of course you should highlight what you've done right, but because we're in a community, others will reference you so it may not matter as much.

Update: Dawn Foster has some good points on how to find out who's a real social media consultant.

Talking About It Openly Can Help
Here's a unique approach, my friend Cece Salomon Lee a PR/Marketing/Social Media professional on vendor side recently god laid off, (her husband was laid off the next business day) and she's chronicling her journey on this blog Survival Mode. I worked with her on a client/vendor relationship and am happy to be her reference.

When Layoffs Are A good Thing
Before the recession was announced, I planned a trip to Maui, in fact I just got back last week. What did I notice? Now is a great time to go on a vacation. Flights were $250 round trip from SF to Oahu (ours was only 1/3rd full), and condos were renting at $100 a night. You can go to Costco and buy food on first day, avoid eating out, and rent a car for $25 a day and go to the world's best beaches. So if your job is secure, or you got a nice severance check take that trip you've always wanted to.

Of course, layoffs are good, actually great, but only if you're the CEO of Seagate, who received a $5,000,000.00 severance paycheck, that's a golden parachute inside of a parachute, with a backup parachute on a glider. I counted last night, that means they'd need to sell over 50,000 Seagate Free Agent Drives (less than $100 each) to make up for that compensation not counting his $500 hourly consulting fee. I'll be he's going to Hawaii.

I have a Forrester report coming soon based on the survey results from top brands, whether or not they are going to increase or decrease their social media marketing spend during a recession stay tuned.

OK now that we've established that the #1 most important thing in building the mesh is the Human - and their ID, personas, social graph and groups they're members of, what's the second most important thing?

Content as infrastructure

I say the notion of persistent ubiquitous content. And when I say content - I mean all sorts of content - movies, TV shows, music and books - blog posts, links, RSS feeds, wikis - ideas, statistics, directories, memes, stories, articles, lists of links, concepts and most importantly personal expression byproduct.

What I mean by being persistent is that this content gets stored up on the web and is always there. And by ubiquitous - I mean its everywhere. So always there and everywhere.

What's important to keep in mind when building the mesh is that everything starts and ends with the user, the customer, the human being who's using the stuff. That's why every one of these blog series' posts will have the user's ID (profile page) at the center of the drawing. Then by overlaying any or all of these domain' drawings on top of each other, we'll be able to get an idea of what the mesh will actually look like - which I'm betting will be a hodge-podge and distributed mesh' of inter-connecting pieces - loosely coupled together.

No one vendor will be able to dictate exactly how the mesh will evolve. It'll be a hybrid combination of open and proprietary standards, all driven by market factors, latest trends and a gradual education of the mainstream populace as to the benefits of all this stuff.

You'll also notice that I'll put an RSS icon and the words - DataPortability and Interoperability on each chart - as well. Think of these things are portals or rabbit holes between each of the domains' I'm writing about.

Some of the connections between the components and domains of the mesh - will be based upon open standards, like RSS, OpenSocial or OpenID while others connectors' will be proprietary APIs, like Microsoft Windows Live Contacts APIs or MySpace APIs. And just so we're clear - the purpose of these blog post series is to map out how these various kinds of domains will all exist unto themselves as their own unique dimensions connecting to humans and providing unique functionality for us all - moving forward.

If we (software developers) can all agree upon standardized constructs, such as an RSS feeds, shared public servers, user profile pages or groups - then we can have disparate implementations, techniques and solutions - while at the same time - provide a comprehensive, loosely coupled meshed architecture which anyone can contribute to and benefit from - just like the web.

This mesh doesn't have to get LED by Microsoft or Google, but they can contribute to it - for sure. But I just wanna remind everyone that this all started with RSS and RSS readers - and the fact that no one (despite some efforts) owns or controls RSS. And even though HTML has it's own little governance and political world surrounding it - it also is not controlled' by any one entity or constituency.

Over the years I've given up thinking that there's one way to build the mesh, or that one set of altruistic standards and solutions will fit all.

As long as there is time - Microsoft will do it their own way. As the dusts of time accumulate we'll see that Google is also it's own world - unto itself. And there's no way in hell you're ever gonna tell Steve Jobs how to do soemthing, he's always gonna be his own man.

So now the questions are: will Facebook continue to innovate, extend and grow - or just become a puppet aligned with Microsoft? I'd also like to see if MySpace will continue on it's own path, or will it become subservient to Google? And thank god for the Evan Williams' of the world!

Politics aside - from a technology POV this is all possible, but it's gonna take cooperation, devoid of ageism, sexism or capitilism to make this all work. Yes we all need to make money, but NO you don't get to lock my balls up in YOUR vice. Ain't gonna happen.

The little guys needs to live off the crumbs left behind by the behemoths and this whole thing needs to work around the world - evenly.

So as user's behavior patterns shift and migrate and as vendors smarten up and start thinking of the user FIRST - in the center of all universes, I believe that the market trends and pressures from users will define the mesh. This series of blog posts simply lay out SOME of the domains, standard constructs and APIs - that will make up the mesh. it is by no means complete or exclusive.

Technology solutions today enable users to assume that we can buy music (and soon) movies through the web just as easy as going to Virgin Megastore or Wal-Mart. Customers are getting over Blockbuster and are choosing NetFlix instead. Because of separate regional rights and languages - we're seeing music and movie downloading and rental solutions pop up around the world.

End-uers are getting used to the notion of storing their files (text, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.), their media libraries (images, music, videos, etc.) and their user generated content' (blog posts, reviews, etc.) in storage facilities or storage lockers (as they're sometimes referred to) - on the web. On-line storage is an entire market category, though it's gonna be hard for small guys like Box.net and Omnidrive to compete with the likes of Amazon's S3, AOL's XDrive or both Microsoft and Google's storage offerings (Live drive and GDrive.) But god bless them - they are alternatives to the bug guys.

But storing files you own and control is only part of what ubiquitous and persistent content is all about.

What I MOST excited about is when we can rely upon old news reels, stock photo libraries, statistics libraries, biographies and documentaries - from places like the BBC open project and the Internet Archive. Wikipedia is also morphing towards this sort of on-line knowledge dissemination and availability.

Pioneered by Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive - the idea of backing up the web' was so outrageous that I just couldn't believe it when I first heard of it.

You mean they're going to backup - the entire web - how many times? Forever?

And then when I heard about the BBC Open project - my head did a similar thump you mean the entire library of everything the Beeb has ever done will be available -on-line forever? (Of course we've found out later that its not quite everything and that it's gonna take YEARS to get all the rights clearances - but at least they got the right idea!)

Soon after the Beeb announcement Pathe also made their catalog on-line BUT they were charging for it - and it was minuscule compared to what the Internet Archive and the Beeb have.

We tried to to do a storage play for bloggers, podcasters and vloggers called ourmedia.org (back then) - as a UGC front-end to the Internet Archive. But the same month we launched - YouTube launched. So we know what happened with that scenario.

Now persistent ubquitous content is available for everyone. Your great American rock video, novel, soap opera or viral video - can be stored up in YouTube (or blip.tv.meta-cafe, Revver, whatever [insert 40 brand names here.]

If you step back and think about content as infrastructure you can take a different attitude towards stock photos, soundtracks and beats, 3D models, 3D city models and all sorts of reusable digital content assets. You can bake historical references, sports statistics, background on diseases and weather trends into your blog posts and software. You can make collaborative hypermedia a dream come true.

A mesh which has ubiquitous persistent content in it - as a key construct - is a mesh that can provide health information, small business knowledge and courseware for all ages - free and built into word processors, email, spreadsheets or browsers.

A mesh which has ubiquitous persistent content in it - can enable entirely new kinds of record labels, movie studios and book publishers - which have a fighting chance of surviving. By lowering distribution, development and www costs - we can enable the Long Tail to at least cover their costs and pay the rent and feed themselves.

A mesh which has ubiquitous persistent content in it can seamlessly tie into other domains like the Live Web or Tools- and seamlessly mesh' with other constructs like micro-content, aggregators or collections.

Persistent ubiquitous content is an idea who's day has come.

I'm hoping that in all the billions of dollars of revenues, greed and exploitation of users, we can make sure to get enough content on-line and available for free - that new kinds of educational tools, knowledge bases and learning environments can evolve - to make our kids even smarter than we are.

Persistent ubiquitous content is a domain which can mesh into any other domain, construct and API. Here's a chart outlining some of the ways I think of this:

all sorts of opinions - threadsML, message boards, stored conversations, IM transcripts,

Action Items in this domain include:

- MORE free content - we'll never be done, they'll never be enough!

- APIs for content infrastructure - not sure what two-way APIs would be here - but they'r eimportant!

- standards for content infrastructure - hmm - I wonder what that would look like?

- educational objects' - that's an idea that's been bantered around for a while!

- persistent conversations - which are re-entrant and annotatable. That's what ThreadsML was all about.- and (of course) we need to continue to educate end-users onwhat the hell it is we MEAN by persistent ubiquitous content!

Action Items in general include:

- make sure that ALL the open standards continue to rise in popularity, that all implementations are compatible with each other and that more open standards get created

- testing and compatibility labs - a place where we can guarantee that everything works together. Building a COMPATIBLE mesh will be a challenge - and it won't ever happen if things break or don't work.

- two-way APIs - until we can write back into systems and services as easily as we can get data from those services we won't have a symmetrical architecture and a successful mesh environment

- establish OutputThis as a standard for content producers to list all of the destinations they'd like to route their content - to. SEE Dataportability.

Summary of persistent data repositories discussed here:

Box.net, Omnidrive, S3, GDrive, Live Drive, XDrive, Wikipedia, Revolution Health, Stats Inc., Freebase, Twine, DMOZ, Technorati, Hulu, iTunes, Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, all sorts of wikis I didn't even bother to put down. All the micro-content places - I'll cover in the next post!

Major players and people to watch and listen to:

Brewster Kahle, J.D. Lasica, Ross Mayfield, Brad de Graf, Jon Lebkowsky, Harold Gilchrist, Susan A. Kitchens, Mike Linksvayer, Mary Hodder, David Weinberger, Howard Rheingold, Stephen Downes, B.K. DeLong, Brian Dear, Marc Eisenstadt, Christopher Allen, Aaron Swartz, Paolo Valdemarin, Jamie Faye Fenton, Bernard Goldbach, Jeremy Zawodny, Larry Lessig, Joi Ito, Jimmy Wales

Major organizations and advocacy groups:

BBC, Internet Archive, ourmedia, mediaventure, Creative Commons,

Final NOTE: This is my second post in this series - I ain't done yet! Next up - #3 - micro-content.