There were plenty of things to consider at BlawgThink, only some of them to do with technology. For example, MindManager (an event sponsor) was ubiquitous but also stayed out of the way. We were using it to support what we were doing, rather than having it get in the way.
It was interesting seeing others using Mind Manager. I've been using MindManager since March, though I've toyed with it before then. Seeing how others use the tool themselves teaches me new things about what it might do. This is the case with many of the tools I use.
I also want a tablet PC more than ever after watching MindJet's Hobie Swan "live mapping" on his tablet. Combined with ActiveWords' InkPad, I could see having a lot of fun with that. Oh, and getting some value from it too. It doesn't help that my laptop blue-screened at the very end of the meeting. (Seems to be fine now.)
There were a raft of suggestions and pointers thrown about during the formal presentations and in small group conversations. It was almost too much to follow. I've already looked into cleaning up my blog in a number of places. Some of this seems to be never-ending.
- Look at FeedBlitz to offer an email subscription to my blog. I've recently moved to FeedBurner to get a better understanding of my site traffic. They've hooked up with FeedBlitz to provide accounting of email subscriptions too. I'll test it for a few days before offering it to my readers.
- Always check my web feed to make sure it is behaving properly. I made a few tweaks last week and discovered this week that the "link" was not coming through correctly. I primarily do this by being sure to aggregate my own feed, and I check Feed Validator when there seems to be trouble.
- Re-check my "tag" links for tags. Technorati has not been seeing my entries lately, and now I know why. Rather than looking at the displayed name, Technorati apparently looks at the last term in the URL. For example, <a href="http://joesgarage.com/foobar" rel="tag">NeatO</a> is considered to be tagged with "foobar," not "NeatO" as I had expected. Sadly, this information is lacking on the Technorati tag help page. I got help on this from A Consuming Experience. There's a somewhat readable specification for rel=tag.
- Update my comments area to clarify that comments will be in the public domain and that I moderate them.
- Tweak the templates for better display of meta-data. Change the title into a link.