Blog Business Summit – Chris Pirillo & Marc Canter

Marc Canter starts out by singing opera. He’s better than Don Box.

Marc, ourmedia.org , Broadband Mechanics, Bryght, Drupal. Vlog, Video Logging.

Artists can upload video, text, graphics into the Internet Archive for free, get unlimited storage & unlimited bandwidth. This is not business as usual. Sorry all flacks and former flacks, your business model is gone. Cut through the BS, read the Cluetrain Manifesto, honesty and transparency.

Trends: blogosphere, guerilla marketing, get rid of your internal team and outsource.

Battle of attrition, it is a when question, not an if question. Caution about taking VC money for this reason. Everyone has their own angle to combine blogging, consulting, open source, etc. Nodes in a distributed mesh.

How do you do it yourself?

World will be a better place with everyone send out their own messages. Blogosphere as agent of change for corporate messages. Every enterprise needs change.

Blogging is the first kind of micro-content; there will be many others.

Broadband Mechanics – Digital Lifestyle Aggregators. Create & promote open standards. Social networking. FOAFNet, ourmedia.org. FOAFNet didn’t take off but he didn’t go home and cry. You have to stick with it, leave that stake in the ground. He’ll build things atop these open standards. Amazon, Google, eBay as infrastructure for web 2.0.

DLA, lots of ways to make money. Hardware, ISPs, existing software entities, major brands and media companies.

Sharing: flickr, del.icio.us, webjay, etc.

At Broadband Mechanics, will be a registry of repositories, not just a storage mechanism.

Open APIs and schemas, everyone can hook up and jack in. Open source photo albums, juke boxes, slide shows.

Provide infrastructure, don’t step on anyone’s toes. Use Creative Commons licenses.

Humans sneak technology in the side door at companies. IM, Mac, etc. Enterprise technology getting in to the home. LAN, DVD burning, WiFi.

Blogging is about getting the message out, regardless of the tools.

Ok, on to Chris Pirillo. Manifesto written a couple of years ago, email is dead, RSS is the future.

Started with lockergnome.com site back in 1996, when he was in Iowa. Email newsletters in 1996, for several years. 1998 or 1999 wrote a book about it, for-pay PDF download. Webcam interview for a TV show, next day he was asked to be on a TV show, hired on for Tech TV, moved to San Francisco, then on to LA. Realized that email was not working, partnering with Jake Ludington. Making money with RSS, he does it, there is a business model for all that he does. He now lives in Seattle.

Do a live feedster search, feedster’s been flakey lately, he says. He’s the #1 Chris on Google.

He likes doing stuff more than just sitting around talking about it. Monetize, monetize, monetize. How? Google AdSense. Blogged Scoble’s birthday using Muvee, compresses it down to desired size, on Chris Pirillo Show. Show is 3 hours live, on Thursday nights, interviews and mini-interviews. Sponsors like Windows Media.

Lockergnome, where’s the money in content? Send press releases that are of interest to his users, he’ll take them and make money from them. He tracks thousands of feeds, people, interpersonal relationships. Email is good for P2P, but not for mass mailings.

RSS, here’s some raw data, just a web page, some codes. Sucked in by a news aggregator such as NewsGator or BlogLines, organized.

His pages, big AdSense in the middle, bring people back to his universe. He’ll be doing a seminar on how to make $500/day using free content. Look for his seminar coming up in June in conjunction with Gnomedex 4.5. Infuses advertising in with the feed, and at the end of the feed links to the other parts of the Lockergnome universe.

Building the web on APIs, download site built by Jake. Stuff from Amazon, lots of books. Links, but he doesn’t like the Amazon Affiliate program at all. Blog ads. He is AdSense’s best friend. How much? I can cover everyone’s house payment with what I am making.

Also pulling in eBay data, attaching to their affiliate program. He doesn’t like affiliates since the advertiser gets free branding. He’ll never hire another ad sales person as long as he lives, “you all suck.” Speak to me as a human being, have transparency.

Copernic desktop search, better than Google’s or MSN’s. New version supports Mozilla and Firefox.

New term “dooced“, getting fired for blogging. Get ahead by taking risk, sometimes get arrow in the back.

If someone says something disparaging, take it like a human, respond!