In accordance with Southwest's "customers of size" policy, Smith had purchased two tickets but then stood by for an earlier flight, which had one seat remaining. That is when the airline forced him off the plane.

Given that neither Amazon nor any of the other e-book/e-reader retailers has managed to provide a compelling electronic textbook, I should have known that Apple might be the one. ... McGraw-Hill just happens to be the number 3 textbook publisher in the world. That spells a lot of potential content.

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)

The Tech Podcast Network team, about 7 of them, canvased CES 2010 shooting video from open to close every day.

The video below is a highlight that they shot on Saturday with Ted from RED.

If you would like to see more information about it and hear straight from Ted about the Scarlet this is the video for you.

There was a ton of video shot at CES this year from all the press and attendees. To sift through all of it would be impossible. I chose to share this from the Tech Podcast Network team because of their dogged dedication to sharing as much of the show as possible.

Sharing a coffee with them in them in the blogger lounge (which was much more comfortable and less packed than the press room) was an opportunity to pick their brains for the next booths to hit up.

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Tech Podcast Network from CES is a post from: TechStartups.com

A Guest Post by David Cleland from TotalApps.

In 2006 I proudly started my first blog, DigMo! It was technology, it was creativity, it was music and it was education. Despite it being a bit of blog soup I was pleased at how quick the site grew but within a few years it reached a critical point beyond which I really couldn't get the traffic to grow. The site was frankly far too general to appeal to a specific community.

The site had a massive 80% bounce rate and taking advice from reading the great advice on this site I decided to take stock and critically re-evaluate the future of DigMo!

As a result I decided to split the site and create two separate niche blogs, DigMo! To focus on educational technology and I launched a new site, TotalApps, to focus on Mac and iPhone App reviews. The thought of starting from zero scared me and I looked at ways to get the site up and running quickly.

I decided the best way to draw attention to the blog was to offer regular site competitions. Finding companies willing to sponsor prizes was actually much easier than I initially expected. I tend to target companies whose product I have reviewed and especially if the review has been popular with readers.

With blog authors being urged to declare any products they are able to keep once a review is published what better way to retain your creditability but by passing the review samples on to your readers as a competition prize ? It seems to me like a logical benefit that will add value to your site and grow the community.

The Mistakes

I think it is best to share my mistakes with the Problogger readers and the initial competitions I ran simply required visitors to leave a comment on a post. This didn't grow the site and managed to result in a massive 70% bounce rate i.e. the users came, entered, and left knowing we would email them if they had won.

The Successes

I decided if I was going to make competitions really work they needed to be of benefit not only to the visitor but also the site and thus I needed to limit entry to RSS subscribers (both email and reader)

The solution was simple and surprisingly successful and will basically work for anyone running a Wordpress blog even with a custom theme.

Setting the competition up takes a tiny bit of code adjusting but nothing too difficult.

The Concept

The competition works by placing a code at the bottom of blog posts that will only appear when the entry is read in an RSS reader, i.e. it does not appear on site.

To do this I used a known solution that was pointed out to me by fellow blogger Thaya Kareeson.

There are a few versions of this idea around but this solution works brilliantly on TotalApps. As I haven't come across any plug-ins that can run competitions this bit of code fiddling is the ideal solution for now.

Getting Started

Open the functions.php file in your current theme folder (I would back this up before adding the code just to be on the safe side).

Paste the following code into the text :

function contest_post_filter($content) {
if ( is_feed() )
return $content.'TotalApps Competition Code (Please note it is case sensitive) : a12221s';
else
return $content;
}
add_filter('the_content','contest_post_filter');
function contest_comment_filter($comment_text) {
return str_replace('a12221s', '[code hidden]', $comment_text);
}
add_filter('get_comment_text','contest_comment_filter');

There are two lines you need to change - 1. the line that says TotalApps Competition Code and 5 lines down the code is repeated (a1221s).

I recently ran a competition where visitors could win a copy of Screenflow 2.0. The following screenshot shows the bottom of the post as it appeared in the browser.

. and this is how it looked in the RSS reader. You should note your RSS Feed must be the full article view (i.e. not just the abstract) for the code to appear.

When the competition closes as I generally ask the sponsor to select a number between 1 and the number of comments and then contact the lucky winners using the email address in the comment.

When a competition closes you can either comment out the code in functions.php by adding /* before the code and */ after or alternatively is simply change the text to "No competition at present"

Offering a reason to sign up to the RSS feed resulted in the number of TotalApps RSS subscribers growing in one month to double the number of readers DigMo! had after 3 years.

Tips :

• Know what your readers want and try and target prizes appropriately.
• Make sure you link to your RSS and RSS by Email Feeds in the post to make it as easy for visitors to subscribe as possible.
• Make sure you make the rules clear and post the winner's name publicly on site.
• Where possible have the competition sponsors look after the postage. This not only saves you time and hassle but it is also assures the sponsor the competition is above board.
• Don't run competitions for more than a week as most of the comments tend to happen in the first week after that it dries up quickly.

I have to say I am certainly no expert in coding or blogging but am really excited to find a solution that really works for managing the competitions and I am equally as excited to see the number of subscribers grow.

There may even be better solutions out there and if you know of any I would be keen to hear them.

David Cleland is a teacher based in Ireland who runs three successful blogs (TotalApps, FlixelPix and Digmo.co.uk)

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How To Run Subscriber-Only Competitions on Your Blog

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By Senior Editor Kris Smith

The semantic web is well on its way and one of the startups that has taken an early lead is Zemanta. They have taken a unique approach to linked data and the science that powers their ability to create structured content from it. They aimed their service at publishers, not the IT crowd.

Typically, semantic technology companies rely heavily on their colleagues with computer science degrees not the actual publisher. They will deliver products as API's or server side solutions with a hefty price tag. Zemanta has created the right relationships with CMS and blogging platform owners to integrate their tools within administration sections.

They offer AJAX'ed out components in these platforms that reads from the main content box as a publisher types a post and updates linked content like photos, links and tags that are appropriate for the post. By doing this it allows the publisher to focus on their post and actual release content faster.

The core of their service is to intelligently eliminate the need for the publisher to start research from ground zero. They offer points of direction inside the administration interface to guide the publisher to resources quickly. I am most impressed with the way that Zemanta handles tags and the relationships between them.

Zemanta does offer an API, I have used it in the past. The API returns data quickly and an even more robust set than the plugin style for CMS's. A sample request returns maps, categories, links, excerpts and more. The only problem that I encountered was one that all semantic companies have right now, context and sentiment for breaking news.

Semantic services rely on hefty algorithms that need sample data to create the links between data and develop sentiment. As a result of this issue, it makes it very hard to implement solutions that work with real-time data and syndication of that content. Most times, once something has hit a feed or been released to a partner site it cannot be updated with linked data. I've been told it is something that the Zemanta team is working on.

Zemanta makes it easy to Zemify your content in WordPress, Drupal, Movable Type among others and possibly Blogger in the future.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

Post from: TechStartups.com

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By Senior Editor Kris Smith

You can only neglect your users for so long before they leave you. The same goes for lovers. And I, was in love with Google Reader once.

Then one day I realized Google Reader wasn't loving me as much as I loved her. So I walked out. We see each other, maybe once a month or so, for short periods of time while we trade feeds.

Reasons

At first she didn't accept my privacy when I wanted to put authenticated feeds in the system. Then she wouldn't allow me to have my shared items back when I asked for them. I wanted all of them . . . but she only gave me 20 at a time. What about the thousands of items I had shared with her? Enough. I couldn't take it any longer. I had to do something about it.

Solution

Two years ago I began caching my Google Reader shared feed so I could access to all the items. Back then Reader hadn't added any features around sharing like search. But I had it once I was storing the items. What I had created then was a strange knowledge base that I could now query to find content that I found of value and had filtered for myself.

Value

Quickly, I added about 10 more shared feeds from friends and other people that I respected online. After about two weeks I had forgotten about Google Reader and found myself hanging out with my new friends . . . well, hanging with their knowledge bases. Here I was capturing tacit knowledge from some of the people I respected the most for their minds.

Filtering

What was now stored for my querying pleasure was content from the best publishers on the planet filtered by the sharpest people I could find. I began to build other tools around the data like grouping by publisher, sharer, keywords and gobs of new feeds.

I built tracking around it to see how robots traversed the feeds since the actual data was locked in a password protected site. Which turned out not to be that big of a deal since the title links were directed back to the publishers.

By adding new user controlled filtering mechanisms on top of pre-filtered data that was pouring into the system, it became much easier to produce pages and feeds for topics that interested me.

Here are a couple of feeds to demonstrate what I am talking about:

Keyword: http://www.filome.com/key/1/micropayments.rss
Group: http://www.filome.com/group/ksmith/1/Taminania_Brain_Science.rss
Sharer: http://www.filome.com/1/robdiana.rss
Likes: http://www.filome.com/likes/1/08100556675301148205.rss

What Reader is Doing Now

Since we broke up, she's been adding features but they are all at the feed level and not down to the individual publisher post level. The Bundles that she allows you to create are feed based. Instead of receiving 1 or 2 items of an interesting topic from a few publishers you get all the items in those feeds . . . many more than 2. It's like being in a forest and finding a twig that you want and your date cuts down 10 trees and hands them to you saying, Look, I got your twig. Happy now?

Where Reader is Going

For fear that they are going to be crushed by Facebook and Twitter, Google appears to have put some emphasis on the Reader team and either given the resources or freedom to improve the system. I would even venture to say that members of the Blogger team might be instrumental in some of these improvements. She should look to her friends for support during difficult times.

Where Reader Should Be

I'm gonna break it down nice and easy.

1. Grouping content at the individual post level
2. Feeds for everything
3. Portability of all shared/liked items from the day a user signs up
4. Content shopping cart
5. New UI 85% of web users don't read feeds. Get pretty.
6. Open up as a hub for syndication
7. Give publishers real metrics about subscribers, sharers and likers
8. Allow publishers to create community around these users (within Google)

I am still in love, but I have better things to do

My favorite part of her is still the shared feeds. Like perfume they remain long after she has left the room. They add value to the ecosystem and to the lives of those that have access to them. And since Google Reader is sitting on this massive mountain of filtered and expertly curated data, they should use it as their greatest asset in the coming walk-off with Facebook and Twitter.

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

Post from: TechStartups.com

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