Blog tracking and blog content

The Day 1 schedule at the New Communications Forum allowed attendees to attend only four of the six breakout sessionsS. So I cheated a bit and split one session between Jeremy Pepper's review of blog metrics and Trudi Schuett's pointers on writing for blogs.

Jeremy presented a useful review of various free and paid blog-tracking services, explaining how they are used and, in some cases, how their business models work. Some of the services were new to me and I'll no doubt appreciate having the session slides to refer to -- but the scope of the discussion was too limited to keep me from slipping off to check out the "Writing for Blogs" session.

(One valuable analogy I took from Jeremy: "Using RSS readers is like tracking the trade press." And a set of pointers: "Blog often. Don't be a shrinking violet. Trade links. Comment, comment, comment and ping, ping, ping.")

Trudi's session was vey small and seemed to have consisted primarily of exchanges between participants. I didn't see any slides or handouts, so I couldn't gauge any overall motif that may have unified the session. Anita Campbell offered a number of useful suggestions on tracking feed hits (she uses SyndicateIQ.com), repurposing blog content for newsletters, and how to generate links to your own posts.