Outbrain's First at Blogworld

We erected the first Outbrain booth at BlogworldExpo in Las Vegas last week. (Pictured left with Raanan Bar-Cohen, Automattic (blue shirt) and myself)  As with any firsts in a startup you prepare as best you can then hope for a good response. Thanks to so many enthusiastic bloggers we had a great show. From an exhibitor standpoint the traffic was consistent and for our purposes qualified. If you want to see how I dealt with an unexpected situation after the first day of the show take a quick jaunt over to my blog for a chuckle. For Outbrain, the best compliment we received was that many of the bloggers installed our rating widget onto their blogs right from the booth. Thanks to all of you who

made that effort. We look forward to having you in the Outbrain network.

The best part of this conference was meeting such a wide diversity of bloggers covering so many different subjects. For example, I met Anita Cohen-Williams from MySearchGuru, Joyce Chang from ShoeBlog, Greg Blandford at Investor Village and Larry Ward from Political Media.  Unfortunatley I did not catch many of the sessions (due to being busy with demos which was great) but I did catch the media mogul talk. Although the session was a bit repetitive, there were some real gems in the discussion such as Jeremy Wright's (CEO b5media) comments on the value of passionate bloggers operating in small niches.   Richard Jalichandra (CEO Technorati) shared some insight into where he and the team will be taking Technorati and Brad Hall (Programming Director for Weblogs Inc.) struck a chord with his distinction between journaling and journalism. Thanks to Rick Calvert and his team for putting on a good show. As for suggestions on how to improve the event, you can check out my comments here and Nate Westheimer's (CEO Bricabox) comments here. We will be posting a conference schedule on our site shortly, but we will be back next year. As for the other shows, if the bloggers are there, there is a good chance Outbrain will be there as well.