Gary Thornock's Weblog

I'm writing this from the Utah Bloggers conference. At the moment, people are still on the way in. We've got a fairly diverse group tonight: I see several former co-workers from my days at Provo Labs, members of the Provo and Salt Lake Linux user groups, and political bloggers Rob Miller and Bob Aagard, as well as candidates Christian Burridge and Pete Ashdown. (Pete will be on the panel tonight.)

Questions for the panel:

• What platforms do you use? — Three of the five panelists use WordPress. The other two use Moveable Type. Also mentioned were Radio, Blogspot and TypePad.
• Making money: Dr. Windley — you can make money from your blog, via advertising, or you can make money because of your blog, through things like speaking engagements. Phil Burns — there's also the customer service and customer interaction aspect to making money because of your blog.
• Rob Miller asks Dr. Windley: What are some of your favorite political blogs? — I don't read political blogs, except as they're aggregated in the "Other Voices" section of UtahPolitics.org. Balanced sites don't get much readership, but they're interesting to read.
• Tips on starting a blog:
  • Read the guide on Dr. Windley's site about starting a blog.
  • Start with a free site, but pretty soon, you'll want your own domain.
  • Don't host on your company's IT infrastructure, even with permission: you want to be able to take your blog with you.
  • Don't host on your company's domain. Build your personal brand.

Some thoughts on the next event: probably in about 6 months, may be a full day or two day conference. Watch the blog at utahbloggers.com for information.

After conference edit: I've seen posts from Phil Windley and Charley Foster about the conference. I'm sure there are several others too; the event was well attended, and several people had laptops out blogging about it.