A full week has passed since the Web Communications and Strategies Conference, so it seems like a good time to take stock of the online output from the conference, and look for ways to increase it next year.

The conference was hosted at Salisbury University, in Salisbury, MD, a town near Maryland’s eastern shore, approximately 30 miles west of Ocean City, MD. Many of the 150 in attendance were university webmasters or marketers.

Conference Website

For starters, there is the conference website, which links to several presentations, podcasts, and blogs. Of the ten links to presentations (of a total of approximately 24 presentations given) , six are for presenters from the corporate space, three are for presenters from universities, and one lists both a corporate and university presenter.

Blogs

Several blogs have covered the conference. Here are the ones I’ve encountered that cover the conference with more than a passing mention.

Eduweb: Many reports filed under Higher Ed Web Conference.

Collegewebeditor: A number of reports filed under Conferences.

Sinkingships.net: Lengthy reports and outlines filed under 2005 Web Communications and Strategies Conference.

Audio/Podcasts

Using a wireless lavalier microphone, a small mixer, and a PowerBook, I recorded a few sessions from the conference. The audio is posted on petersons.com for two keynotes and four regular sessions. If you really want to, you can subscribe to the feed, although the last of the audio has already been posted. Regrettably, an inadequate mic setup for an afternoon panel discussion rendered the audio from that session unusable. I had planned to conduct some interviews and post the audio of those, but I was too busy to do the interviews. The conference web site also lists a podcast from the conference by TargetX.

Other Media

There was a TV crew at one of the sessions I attended (I’m fairly certain it was this session), but I didn’t catch the call letters, and I haven’t been able to find a related video or article on any of the local TV station websites.

Search Engine Results

What do some search engines turn up about the conference?

Google: Pages linking to salisbury.edu/webconf. Right now, this returns 15 pages.

Google: A search of .edu pages containing the phrase “web communications and strategies conference” today turns up salisbury.edu and only one other .edu, bloomfield.edu.

Yahoo: Pages containing the phrase “web communications and strategies conference.” Right now, this returns 238 pages. This turns up one or possibly two additional blogs beyond the ones I list above.

Technorati: Posts containing the terms “salisbury web conference.” Right now, this returns 107 posts, many of which do not pertain to the conference.

Technorati: Posts containing the phrase “web communications and strategies conference.” Right now, this returns 20 posts from the last 26 days.

Commentary on the State of the Online Output

So I have to ask the obvious question. Why do there seem to be so few bloggers among the university web communicators and strategists in attendance at the 2005 conference? I realize that there is some debate about the effectiveness of blogs in the educational process (and this was the subject of many a discussion at the conference), but is there really any debate about the effectiveness of blogs as communication tools on the Internet?

There was free wireless at the conference and in two hotels where most attendees stayed. There were laptops everywhere. But, despite what one observer suggests, the laptops almost certaintly weren’t being used for blogging - at least not blogging about the conference. At most, four or five bloggers posted about the conference, and very little in the way of non-blog web pages have been indexed by Google and Yahoo so far. Am I using the wrong search engines?

Compare this to the output from the recent Syndicate Conference (May, 2005, NYC), for which Yahoo today turns up “about 14,600 results.” My guess is that approximately 300-400 attended this event. (I was among them.)

Promotional Ideas

This gives me an idea for an inexpensive way to promote the conference next year - if the conference occurs (the conference founder and organizer, Shelley Wetzel, is leaving Salisbury University). How about beginning the conference with a mini-workshop on setting up a blog? Using one of the free online blogging tools (e.g. Blogger), a facilitator will walk the audience through the process of setting up a blog and creating their first post. Those with laptops will be welcome create their own blog. In turn, they can use the blog they’ve created as a place to publish their notes about the conference.

I can think of several benefits to doing this. First of all, it’s important for university webmasters and marketers to know how to use blogging software. Second, this will almost guarantee that next year’s conference will dwarf this year’s in terms of online output.

Aside: Come to think of it, Dave Winer’s new outliner/blogger seems particularly well suited to conference blogging.

In the process preparing for this conference, I learned that RSS can be a very useful thing for promoting material that’s yet to be published. Before the conference began, I created a podcast feed and a simple “Welcome” podcast and registered it with iTunes. Conference attendees were able to subscribe to the feed through iTunes during the conference (and I watched several of them do it), before the audio of the sessions had even been posted. By now, the audio has made its way to the machines of those subscribers, without them having to take any further action. So, an additional promotional idea would be to set up an official audio RSS feed for the conference, and maybe even a video RSS feed, and give people who record audio and video from the conference a way to add their material to the feed. Attendees, and anyone from the public, can simply subscribe to one or two feeds, and they will automatically get all of the material that’s posted into that feed.