Interested in meeting other bloggers, gaining new ideas for your own blog or just curious as to what “new media” is all about?  If so, give serious consideration to attending the BlogWorld & New Media Expo this September in Las Vegas.  Be sure to check out the conference schedule when you have a minute…it looks promising for novices as well as seasoned bloggers.

The 2008 BlogWorld & New Media Expo will take place September 20-21 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. The first and only industry-wide tradeshow, conference, and media event dedicated to promoting the dynamic industry of blogging and new media. In addition to the only industry-wide exhibition, BlogWorld features the largest blogging conference in the world including more than 50 seminars, panel discussions and keynotes from iconic personalities on the leading-edge of online technology and internet-savvy business. If you are currently blogging, vlogging, podcasting, producing other forms of new media content, entering the new media industry, or just want to know what the blogosphere is all about, then you need to be at the most comprehensive blogging convention–BlogWorld & New Media Expo. Located in the South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center at: 3150 Paradise Road, Las Vegas, NV 89109

We’ll be there this year, so if you plan on going, please drop us a note and scout us out.  During and afterwards we’ll post about the conference to give an overview.

For those of you in the Indianapolis area who have been looking for a local blogging focused conference, be sure to check out Blog Indiana 2008.

Local bloggers from across Indiana will gather at the IUPUI Campus Center on August 16-17th, 2008, for Blog Indiana 2008, a 2-day blogging and social media conference that aims to promote education, innovation and collaboration among Indiana’s fast-growing blogging community. The conference is sponsored by the IU School of Informatics.

Blog Indiana 2008 is a 2-day conference for both experienced and new bloggers alike. Sessions will include topics such as blogging for beginners, using blogs in your business, monetizing your blog, political blogging and more advanced topics. In the past, most blogging and technology-related conferences have either been too expensive or too far out-of-state. Blog Indiana 2008 seeks to bring a low-cost, high-value conference to Hoosier bloggers.

From looking over the sessions, this should be a decent introductory crash course for anyone who is curious as to what blogging is all about and/or anyone who wants to dig in and learn a little more about blogging.  At $49.00 for both days that is a deal as far as conferences go.  Seating is limited to 200 people so register soon if you’re interested.

(We probably won’t make it to this one but would love to hear any attendees thoughts afterwords.)

Following the success of the offical WordPress Extend Plugins Directory the WordPress Extend Themes Directory has just been added.  As this takes off the WordPress Extend Themes Directory will give WordPress.org users easy access to numerous WordPress themes that are open source (GPL) and that are free of “link bait” (this has been a huge problem in the past).

For those of you who haven’t heard yet, development of the WordPress Spam Karma plugin has officially been discontinued and the current code has been released GPL Version 2.  While this isn’t a plugin we use ourselves, we do see it running on probably around 10% (+/-) of our clients’ blogs, thus the announcement has caught our attention.

To address what the future of Spam Karma may hold, we can only speculate from what we’ve seen in the past with other open source projects.  Here are some common scenarios:

• The project will just die. Since this is already “off the ground” we doubt that happens, at least not right away.
• An individual or a group of people will pick it up and run with it.  The majority of WordPress plugins fall under this category.
• A development firm will pick it up and take over development. This could be likely due to the high profile of the plugin as long as the development firm consistently has the time and resources to devote to the development and upkeep of the plugin.

So, with that said, we’ll keep our eyes open to see what happens.  In the meantime, Spam Karma 2.3 Release Candidate 1 seems to still work with WordPress 2.6.

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WordPress 2.6 has been released.

Key new user features include:

• Post Revisions
• Google Gears support
• Image captions and better image control
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one
• Improved WYSIWYG editor
• Theme Previewer
• Word Count displayed when writing and editing posts and pages
• Press This bookmarklet

If you need assistance with upgrading or have any questions regarding WordPress, please contact us.