My first full day at BlogWorld couldn’t have been better. Michelle and I headed down for breakfast and then I headed out to grab my badge. While waiting for the exhibitor floor to open up, Ian Fernando joined me and we got caught up on our plans for the day’s panels. There were a lot of booths to hit, so I just started from one end of the room and began working my way across, skipping those that didn’t interest me and stopping to talk (sometimes at length) with people at booths that caught my eye. One of those was mindtouch, a collaborative wiki system that I am told is much more intuitive than others and can be integrated with WordPress easily. I don’t know that I’m really sold on it since I’m not much of a wiki guy, but I’ll check it out. One program that looks very interesting is Zemanta. The name isn’t the easiest to remember, but the idea is great. Zemanta integrates with WordPress to ease the process of finding photos, videos, and other artcles related to what you’re writing about. The way it was explained to me, it analyzes the text of the post you’re writing and suggests content and links for you as you type, and all the content is Creative Commons friendly. I haven’t tried it yet, but if it lives up to its promise, it should save bloggers a lot of time as well as help the artistic community promote their CC photos and videos. I’ll do a full review when I retrurn to Phoenix. While wandering around the expo floor, I was stopped my a couple people who recognized me, which is always nice. I would have loved to chat more, but I had booths to see.

Ian and I met back up and headed to the panel full of name-dropees, John Chow, ShoeMoney, ProBlogger (Darren Rowse), Copy Blogger (Brian Clark), Zac Johnson, and Jim Kukral. As always, it was full of useful information, and has inspired some small changes I’ll be making to this blog in the near future. This “super panel”, was so popular, in fact, that people were having a hard time pulling themselves away and eventually people had to be reminded that there was another panel scheduled for the room. Before the panel began, I had the pleasure of meeting a couple of my readers, NikNik and Reggie from MyTechOponion. I also had an opportunity to show Jim, the damage I’ve done to my Flip in preparation for the upgrade I’m doing (expect that post soon).

Just before Ian joined me and Michelle for lunch, he let me know that Michelle and I were invited to the Market Leverage dinner at Envy that the super affiliate bloggers were going to. In attendance were the panelists mentioned above as well as a few people who won seats at the dinner, a couple more affilliates, and of course, Deb, Mike, and Jen from Market Leverage. The dinner was almost as great as the opportunity to sit down with some of the blogging elite. John posted pictures of the dinner and all the food, as expected.

The BlogWorld Opening Day party ended at 9:30, so everyone at the dinner missed that, and many of us ended up at the Tempo bar at the Hilton. Shortly after that, Ian, Michelle, the ML crew and I all headed to the Wynn, where we spent the rest of the night at Blush, drinking and dancing.

If you want to see all the photos I took, they’re on Flickr. Day one was awesome, and although I think today will be more relaxed, I’m sure I’ll get just as much out of it.