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.

This past week I found a new “pay wiki” site, OneBuckWiki, who’s offering pages for $1 (until 1000 pages are sold, then it goes up to $10).

While this is a new concept for me*, I do see the potential. But only as long as it is moderated, page owners offer valuable content (more than just ads and a bunch of videos or simple iframe inclusions of existing web pages, as those won’t be taken quite as seriously and will drive people away from the site instead of taking the time to look around), visitors continue to come well after the buzz has died down (and people have moved on to a “clone”) AND people are still willing to buy pages after it goes beyond $1…$10?, $20?, what about $100?.

But for a one time $1 payment I guess there’s not really a whole lot to lose. If you get any site traffic from it, it’s well worth the investment, right (as long as your page rank isn’t penalized for some reason, say if the “powers that be” don’t like the concept)?

Anyway, we went ahead and purchased a few pages to help promote Watershed Studio and Surge Bucket Media. (So far we’ve only had a chance to add content for the weird news page which promotes Squirrel Dish, Utter Oddcast and Utter Oddness.) We’ll see how it goes, and hopefully it’ll turn out to be worth the investment.

* Side note, it does seem somewhat like what you can do with Squidoo (for free), but you have a whole lot more control over the content (which may or may not be a good thing depending upon the design knowledge of the page owners…that could be a decent business service though, probably under the guise of SEO).

• Small Business Summit 2007
  Tuesday, February 13, 2007
  Crowne Plaza Hotel, New York City
• The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines
• Essential Tools Every Blogger Should Have
  Good suggestions in general, but…
  • Most laptops on the market will do (we personally recommend AMD 64 based machines), just stay away from the “crippled” chips out there (if it is a $500 USD laptop, there’s probably a reason for that)
  • Unless you’re doing a lot of design work (coding, graphics, video, audio, etc), two monitors would be overkill
  • Adobe Photoshop is an excellent product, but if you only need to edit photos, GIMP (open source, GPL) should do fine and there are other free or cheaper options out there
  • Of the WYSIWYG editors, Adobe/Macromedia Dreamweaver is at the head of the class, but give Nvu (open source, MPL) a spin first to see if that meets your needs (and budget)
  • Most digital cameras on the market these days will suffice, but the Canon DSLR’s are quite nice if you have that sort of budget and want to carry around a large camera
• Want People to Read Your Blog? Go With a Full Text Feed
• Zune Goes Discount, Contributes to $289 Million Loss for Microsoft
  Does any Microsoft product these days make an initial profit?
• Web Design Contracts: Why Bother
• 25 Tips To Optimize Your Blog For Readers & Search Engines
• WordPress Plugins: Bible Verse of the Day, Our Todo List & Share This 1.4

For advertising on the Watershed Studio blog we are moving away from Google AdSense and we are giving AdBrite a whirl. While AdSense does a great job of serving up relevant “pay-per-click” advertising, we feel it would be better to have the option of advertisers intentionally advertising on the site for as little as one day and at a set price.

If you’re interested in advertising on the Watershed Studio blog you have two options at the moment; advertising on the sidebar of the main page or at the bottom of every individual entry. For advertising information click on the “Advertise with Watershed Studio” link located in the advertising sections.

[Update: January 28, 2008 - We are no longer accepting advertising on the Watershed Studio Blog, but we are still "in the loop" with advertising options and do accept advertising on many of our sister company's (Surge Bucket Media's) blogs.]

Sony easily wins the largest business mistake of 2005 with their DRM strategy.

I won’t go into the details (you can find a good run down here), but the bottom line is that in an effort to curb the “ripping” of certain CD’s Sony decided it was a good idea to install malicious spyware on people’s computers without their knowledge. When you take into account that they’re doing this to customers who purchased the CD and that it can be defeated with a piece of Scotch tape, the only thing they’ve accomplished is to alienate their customers.

Way to go Sony! Whoever is on the PR end of this one is in for a fun time. And I can see additional lawsuits beginning to fly. (I’m just waiting for Sony to sue 3M for creating Scotch tape.) And if they think music sales are down now, I can’t image that this will help matters any.

The lesson we should all learn from this is to listen to your customers and not alienate them. If people want to listen to their music on their MP3 player, let them (especially if you have a division that sells MP3 players). Yes, something needs to be done to curb piracy, but spyware and lawsuits are not the answer. And with the society is going towards “open source” and “creative commons” licensing, it may very well come down to finding different revenue streams or going out of business.