Blog Business Summit Wrap-up

It’s Monday and I’m back in New Orleans after spending the end of last week at the Blog Business Summit (BBS) in Seattle. First, I would highly recommend BBS for people who are thinking about blogging, or for those who have just started blogging. Overall, I didn’t find as much value as I would have liked, I had to dig for it, but it was there. The second day was much better for me than the first day because of Robert Scoble, John Battelle and the Future of Blogging panel (the last session of the conference with Elizabeth Lawley and Matt Mullenweg).

Scoble did a session with his wife titled, “10 Ways to a Killer Blog.” Nothing incredibly insightful here, but their presentation was interesting and organized. They did this whole newly-wed schtick that kept things lively. I’ll dig out my notes and post the 15 (he gave us 5 bonus) ways to a killer blog.

Battelle was great. I’ve seen him speak a few times before, and he brings so much energy and experience to his talks that you can’t help but hang on every word. He told us a lot about himself, and his company, Federated Media, but his most interesting stuff was when he analyzed the evolution of the Web.

I was completely tired by the end of the my second day at BBS, but since Mullenweg was speaking at the end, I decided to stick around. To my surprise, Elizabeth Lawley stole the show. She started her talk by proclaiming that she was a member of the intelligencia and not a tech head (although I beg to differ). The panel was about considering what’s to come in the future, and she had several examples of what she was betting on for the future. Her coolest example was from Microsoft and how they are designing special lenses for cell phones that can scan bar codes. A scanned bar code and the product that it’s associated with can then be searched using global positioning and price comparisons to find the nearest, best price.

In the end, like I said before, I would highly recommend BBS for people just getting started. For someone like me, who gets this whole blogging thing and went seeking concrete take-aways to bring back to my business, BBS may not have been for you this year. Like with all conferences, networking was good, and Seattle was a cool city. This conference could have been much better if they would have assigned moderators to the sessions. Too often, discussions devolved into conversations about the panelists and not the topic that the session title implied.

SiteMighty Update: Getting Data to Fit and Starting Our API

We are currently in the process of importing data into SiteMighty from our first affiliate partner. We need to get data into it so that we have affiliate offers for our beta users to build their sites around and start marketing. We are starting with what we know, credit cards, because we have been in the business for years, and as the old adage goes: do what you know.

Naturally this isn’t easy, and we’re only at our first affiliate network partner. We hope to have hundreds, and we want to develop a very open format for SiteMighty to read and understand the data about the various affiliate offers that an affiliate network has. One of the most complicating part of it is developing the data structure for creating the affiliate link URL because this contains so much data. It has data about the offer, the affiliate marketer, the hit itself, the marketing campaign and the referring site…. phew, its making my head spin. But, we’ve got the structure, and thanks to Oleg and his team, we’ve devised what I think is a very elegant solution that will make it simple for us to build all sorts of different affiliate links incorporating whatever data we need to feed to the affiliate network.

So, before this gets too boring or I reveal all the secrets about the nuts and bolts of siteMighty, let’s get to the point:

Building an API enhances the value of your site because you can accept data feeds and people will find ways to mashup and extend your service, and the best part is, you provide the standards, other people build it.

But there are hard and fast rules of an API, and it is important to keep these in mind:

  1. Never break your API – This means you’ve got to set standards upfront and build flexibility and paths for growth into it from the get go.
  2. Keep it simple – skip the bells and whistles, just get the data you need in
  3. Build it planning for updates - I mentioned this above, but the worst thing you can do is break it and force people to rewrite their apps.

This is the first one we’ve built and it is a critical part of SiteMighty, but it is fun learning as we go. I’ll keep people updated as we keep things moving on this project. If anyone has any comments on building an API or helpful links, we’d love to know your thoughts.

PS: We’re going to be extending invitations to the SiteMighty closed beta test soon. If you are interested, please head here and sign up for an invite.

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