IMG_1696 (Photo credit: mmcallen)
When starting Grass Shack Events & Media my passion was media. I love the act of storytelling through digital media to engage audiences.
I have been a big fan of New Media Expos for a while now. BlogWorld is one of my favorites. This year I could not attend the New York event so I bought the Blogworld Virtual Ticket for $347 which gets me video/audio of the sessions I missed. The video is not actually the video but slides of the sessions with the audio.
It took about a month for the sessions to appear. Blogworld sent out an email saying that we as virtual attendees should check back often and I did for a while. I came across a tweet of my friend Brett Bumeter that he ws enjoying a session by Tim Street. I am a big fan of Tim, so I went right to the site and saw the sessions were up!
I really enjoy downloading the sessions to my iphone and listening while driving, gardening and at the gym. I glean many things from these sessions to enhance my knowledge and implement in business. Taking some best practices from them has actually made our business more successful. So the $347 price tag is worth the investment to me.
This is a pretty monumental job of putting these sessions online when done the way Blogworld produces them. Obviously it is budget driven. We have talked about Sonic Foundry and the services they have provided our events and how engaging they are for hybrid/virtual meetings. In Blogworlds case they are counting on the Javits techs to hit record, and make sure they have good microphones and levels to ensure the virtual audience can hear the content. Most of these seasoned techs can do this in their sleep. This is an early judgment because I have listned to three podcasts so far.
I was travelling and started the download process for one of the tracks. Blogging for Business. I had a fast connection but it took me around 54 minutes to download 9 sessions. Of the 16 classes of Business for Blogging 9 are available for download and 3 more would not download. The others are not offered. When I said above the techs could do this in their sleep… I feel the sessions that were missed might be sleeping techs. 
Why 54 minutes to download? Because you have to find each session and then download it and move it to itunes. Tedious but I was fired up when I got them on my iPhone.
My first session was Jay Baer 12 Imperative Must-Dos for the serious Blogger! GREAT session – really smart guy and I have already implimented a few things he recommended! Sadly, the title should be 11 Imperative Must-dos for the Serious Blogger becaue the 12th was cut off and the question and answer period was also cut out. ugggh I will never know the last imperative!
Next was Jabez LeBret Blogging for The Media: Catapult Yourself by Becoming a Blogger for Major News Organizations: Interesting session I would recomend it. Basically he talks about what I tried to do with MeetingsPodcast to meet people and attend conferences. Jabez is very knowledgeable and gave some great tips and tricks to get you foot in the door to meet people.
Blogworld was very responsive to all my questions and very whiney emails about the issues I was having. They explained how to download the audio, even sent out an email saying the sessions were up. Then they said they were going to a directory of the sessions to cut down on download times.
The virtual ticket is a toss up right now for me. Lots of time and money invested, but also great content so far.
More information on the blogworld virtual ticket Great content if you love all types of media!
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