Ben started off his presentation with a poll of the audience on 'what questions do you have about blogging?' There were some wonderful responses, that I can imagine on many of our minds, even if we've been blogging for some time.

Some key questions from the audience:
- Staff time required?

- Tools available for Blogging?

- Impact on servers?

- How does it affect the Architecture of sites?

- How can you integrate it into an existing site?

- What is the interrelationship between RSS and weblogs, or RSS vs. weblogs?

We're always so damn serious, but this quote on what a blog is from the Scrappleface blog lightened things up a touch.

There was a lot of discussion on RSS vs. Atom and a lot of questions on what is RSS and how does it apply, non-blog, blog only, how do I effectively use RSS in my business. We'll have to incorporate more of this for the next session.

Ben touched on Wiki's, but I'm also thinking that we need more discussion on this. Like, how do I combine them and what tools can I use to do both?

There was a brilliant slide that Ben showed with correlates the word of mouth about your company and it's profits (not overall revenues). It was in reference to the airline industry, and showed SouthWest on top in terms of profits (which we already knew) and their word of mouth index (news to me, but makes sense). Apparently, the data came from a case study in Harvard Business Review (I'll try to find the link)

One of the interesting things that was mentioned on the subject of "how does my blog get noticed" was the element of pinging, which is of critical importance. A website in isolation has no link to any directory by default, whereas a weblog, built with a purist blog tool (like MovableType) is programmed to ping aggregator sites, like weblogs.com, which is scoured by Google, which is how new weblogs get found. It's all part of the ecosystem folks.