New This Year at BlogWorld: Food Trends and Curating Flavors on the Web #TECHmunch

By Zane Aveton on October 21, 2010 in 2010: BlogWorld

NEW THIS YEAR AT BLOGWORLD ~ Food Focus!

With an estimated 30,000 blogs now dedicated to food, BlogWorld co-founder, Rick Calvert voiced that it seemed only fitting that they would join forces with BakeSpace.com’s TECHmunch Food Blogger Conference to make food a primary focus this year.

“The #TECHmunch feature sessions and demonstrations at BlogWorld have been designed to help food bloggers learn how to develop great content, grow their audience and profit financially from their hard work.“

The BlogWorld Kitchen, beautifully outfitted and sponsored by Jenn-Air – was nestled squarely within the Exhibits — which allowed those in the hall who had not originally scheduled to view one of their particular sessions to take notice and easily fall in while still staying immersed in the energy and buzz of the exhibits….and as what most would view as a triple bonus – the new content and the many delectable food samples from the kitchen allowed bloggers to stuff their heads with new content, their bags with brand swag AND their bellies simultaneously. *Triple FTW!

The #TECHmunch session I attended was the Panel “Food Trends & Curating Flavors on the Web: How to Come Up With Great Content” moderated by the very likeable Amanda Coolong (TechZulu/ThisWeekIn.com). Her panelists included Nichelle Stephens (Cupcakes Take the Cake), [updated] Rene Lynch* @renelynch (LA Times Food) *replaced Sarah Gim (Tastespotting.com) and Lindsay William-Ross (LAIst.com)

It was nice to hear each of them - all very popular in their niches – still in the midst of deciding what’s really working, what’s not working right now, but they believe will work in the future…to how they are seeking new “best practices” – from yes or no to blogrolls (some do and some don’t on purpose)…how they are now curating content and how they all want to integrate more ways to converse and continue to sell without “selling.”

“People hate to be sold, but they love to buy….”

My personal favorite takeaway was Amanda’s recommendation they check out the ease of Collecta for keyword curation. Collecta is a real-time search engine tool offering simple check boxes for you to filter the results of your search (e.g. – blog posts, comments, pictures, videos, etc.). It allows easy one click views of individual results as well as easy bookmarking and/or sharing of that post immediately to your community. Current sharing options are Twitter, Facebook, mixx, reddit, delicious and stumbleupon. Collecta always shows the current trends without a need for a search and always keeps a record of your own most recent searches.

Kudos to Ms. Coolong for such an excellent tip that specifically addressed her panelists most “urgent” need….as well as most of ours. I am sure I speak for many in positions responsible for creating value in a branded or private community outside of our own original content, the ability to find tools that allow easy curation (AND easy delivery!) of the most interesting, necessary and relevant content for our audience and the audience we wish to acquire is paramount.

I could start a whole new discussion here on Curation which is being touted as next social THING. Of course it is, it’s a human thing and social is a human space and humans like to share stuff. I’m sure you heard “the people” invented the RT on Twitter, not Twitter – and everytime you RT or share something to your social networks you are curating content for your community. Newsflash: You ARE managing a community! Amber Naslund profoundly noted this recently on her Brass Tack Thinking blog, ”we are all community managers whether we realize it or not…”

I’ve inserted a screen shot of keyword search “blogworld” below in Collecta. **You might want to check out Hubspots recent “Top 9 Awesome Search Engines That Aren’t Named Google” which includes Collecta and a few other awesome search tools that will help you curate the awesome. I’d love to hear if you already have a favorite curation tool in the comments below.

Contantly. Seeking. Awesome. Tools.

Keeping it Real…in Real/Real-time…

Love You / Mean It,

Zane

@zaneology

TECHmunch is an ongoing series of conferences in cities across the U.S. that help food bloggers gain the specific digital media, marketing and business skills they need to make their blogs more personally and financially rewarding. Unlike similarly-themed conferences, TECHmunch takes a practical, grassroots approach featuring local, national and international experts who provide hands-on information that bloggers can apply easily on their own.

TECHmunch image credit & “What’s TECHmunch?” bio – via bakespace.com

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