Tonight at 8:30 PM ET, I’ll be appearing, live via video, on The Tech Buzz. It’s a popular, live streamed tech show on Ustream.TV. Check out the stream and, if you have time tonight, please stop by! We’ll be talking about the book, online community and more. Thanks.

When I posted about my session at the Independent Blogging Conference at Greensboro, I mentioned that I might be doing it with someone else. Well, that person is confirmed and it’s Robert Scoble. He is the Managing Director at FastCompany.TV and has his own Wikipedia page. I met him very, very briefly at both South by Southwest and Blog World Expo and I look forward to sharing the session with him.

Once again, the session is called “Promoting Your Blog Through Social Media,” and we will be highlighting some dos and don’ts of promoting your blog through five key forms of social media: blogging, microblogging, social networking, social bookmarking and forums.

I will be traveling to Greensboro, North Carolina in just under a week to attend a pair of conferences, one of which I will be speaking at. The first is ConvergeSouth on October 17. I am not 100% sure what panels, etc. I will be attending, except to say that I will definitely be at my friend Jonathan Bailey’s session from 10:55 AM through 12:00 PM, titled “Preventing Plagiarism.” Beyond that, I’m going to play it by ear.

The next day, October 18, I will be at the Independent Blogging Conference at Greensboro, a conference put on by Kelby Carr and Dave Slusher to replace the cancelled BlogHer Greensboro. During the morning, I will be on the Opening Panel, to begin the day, at 9:00 AM.

I will also be hosting a session called “Promoting Your Blog Through Social Media,” where I (or we) will be highlighting some dos and don’ts of promoting your blog through five key forms of social media: blogging, microblogging, social networking, social bookmarking and forums. I may be hosting the session with another person, but that is not finalized. I’ll post if and when I know for sure.

Later in the day, I’ll be attending a session put on by my friend Jared Smith, covering his online weather broadcasts.

In addition to meeting Jared (who I’ve known for around 8 years) and Jonathan for the first time, I also look forward to meeting Angela Connor, Michael Kimsal and more! If you’ll be attending, please let me know!

Since it’s been a while since I did one of these, I have a lot of coverage to highlight.

I was asked by Blogs.com to come up with a list of my 10 favorite blogs. Understanding that I would have to leave a ton of people off, I sought out to pick 10 amazing blogs written by great people that I appreciate. I also wanted to have the selections showcase a wide array of my interests. You can check out the list on Blogs.com.

I recently attended Blog World Expo where I had a book signing and a pair of panels, titled “How to Deal With Trolls, Spammers & Sock Puppets” and “Avoiding Disaster: How Not to Use Social Media.”

The “Trolls” panel was covered by Miss604 and Gwen Bell, who wrote an incredibly nice comment about me. The “Disaster” panel was covered by Rich Brooks of flyte blog, Wendy Piersall of Sparkplugging, Social Studies Blog and Barbara Rozgonyi of Wired PR Works.

The panels were also mentioned by Michelle Evans of im.seeking.balance, Rick Beckr of Copywrite, Ink. in a comment on Chris Brogan’s blog and Mike Mueller. My attendance at the conference (and/or the book) was mentioned by Connie Bensen (the book was also mentioned by Jeff Chandler of PerfCast when he was interviewing Connie recently), Nicholas Chase of The Way To Success and Shai Coggins of Just Make Money Online.

I also met Lynn Terry of ClickNewz! and we talked for a while. She wrote about our meeting and conversation on her blog. While at Blog World Expo, I did video interviews with Abby Johnson of WebProNews and Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer TV. I’ve embedded both of these at the bottom of this post.

During and post-conference coverage aside, I was interviewed on the Blog World Expo podcast (along with Chris Alden, the Chairman and CEO of Six Apart), the E-Commerce Success Show with Scott Fox, Zane Safrit’s podcast, SocialMedialogy Conversations and New Media Pro.TV. I also did a text interview on the Blog World Expo blog.

“Managing Online Forums” received new reviews from eModeration, Shai Coggins of Just Make Money Online (Co-Founder and Vice President of Community at b5media), Travis Smith of Unvarnished (and Hop Studios), Liz Fuller of Business and Blogging, Heidi Miller of Talk It Up!, ONLINE magazine and Manny Hernandez, a Top 100 Amazon.com Reviewer, who also wrote about his review on Ning.

Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer highlighted the book in a discussion of Facebook group and brand page best practices, recommending it due to the coverage of user and content management issues.

Hoyt Mann of the Knowledge Management at the Information Technology Toolbox site wrote a nice feature on user guidelines, highlighting the book.

The phpBB Weekly podcast did a pair of segments on “Building a Successful Community,” inspired by the content of the book. They did so in their September 8 and October 5 episodes. It also received a mention on SuccessfoolTV.

It was highlighted in a press release put out by Circle of Seven Productions, a company specializing in book trailers and received a pair of mentions at vBulletin Setup, dealing with books about online communities and user guidelines.

I am overwhelmed by all of the interest and kind words. It’s truly appreciated. Thank you!

Friday, October 3, I’ll be appearing on the E-Commerce Success Show with Scott Fox live at 2 PM ET. Scott is the author of “Internet Riches,” which was published by AMACOM, the publisher of “Managing Online Forums.”

Later this month, on October 21, I’ll be appearing remotely by video at a Social Media Club Louisville event. It’ll be held at The Louisville Visual Art Association at the Water Tower in Louisville, Kentucky at 7 PM ET.

Thank you to Scott and Jason Falls for setting these two events up.

Now that I have returned from Blog World Expo 2008, have had some time to catch up and process the experience, I thought I’d write a detailed personal recap, to share how the trip went and, also, to document it for myself, in the future. This is a super long, highly detailed post. Emphasis on personal and long. You have been warned. :)

Thursday

I was due to fly out late Thursday morning, on September 18. Only thing… my entire family was coming down with a nasty stomach bug. So, while I attempted to sleep, the sounds of them being sick woke me up and kept me up all night and I ended up receiving around four hours of sleep, or so. Not only that, but it felt like I was coming down with it because, an hour before I was to leave, I was sick. Lovely.

The main thing I thought of was how much planning had gone into this trip. I wasn’t just attending the conference, I wouldn’t just be out of a substantial amount of money. I had two panels and a book signing and I had other people that had worked for me to be there and were relying on me to be there. If there was any way I could go, I was going to go.

I basically told myself it was nerves, not an actual illness like the rest of my house (some might call this denial, heh), and pushed myself to get ready and go, make the hour and a half car ride and get to the airport, nauseous much of the time. Worse yet, I had a horrendous flight path. Norfolk, VA to Washington, DC to Los Angeles, CA to Las Vegas, NV. About 10 hours in all, from start to finish. I gritted my teeth and made it. The last one and a half plane rides were not bad as I started to feel better.

From the airport, the cab driver seriously – seriously ripped me off. I had no basis of what the proper fare was as I had forgotten to look into that. We’re talking double the regular fare rip off.

I got to the hotel, the Las Vegas Hilton, around 6 PM local time and met with my friends Brandon Eley and Chrispian Burks, for dinner. I hung out with Brandon and Chris for the vast majority of the conference. We had planned to head to a meet up hosted by my pal (and fellow panelist) Jason Falls, but we were dead tired – I was half falling asleep at dinner. So, that is where my first night in Vegas ended – in bed before 9 PM. But, I fell asleep the moment I hit the pillow and slept 8 hours straight – this turned out to be the only good night of sleep I’d get while at the conference.

I just wanted to mention that I am back from Blog World Expo. Outside of how I slept and felt in the mornings, it went great and the book signing and panels were awesome. I plan to post a detailed recap, but that will take some time, so I just wanted to get a post up, letting you know that I had returned. I appreciate your patience.

You probably already know this, since I’ve talked about it so much, but I’ll be in Las Vegas for Blog World Expo from September 18th through September 22nd. This means that it may be a little longer between posts than usual here during this time.

The conference itself runs from the 19th to the 21st. I’m looking forward to meeting a lot of new people and talking with a lot of people I already know. If you are coming, I’d love to meet you – please stop by one of the events I’m participating in or send me a note on Twitter and we can try to meet up!

After the conference, I’ll have videos, a recap and more.

Thank you for visiting ManagingCommunities.com.

Unfortunately, BlogHer Greensboro has been cancelled. I had registered and was planning to attend. However, I will still be attending ConvergeSouth and I look forward to it.

I’ve been talking about it for quite a while now, but with Blog World Expo almost here, I wanted to go ahead and post my full appearance schedule. Please let me know if you are going to be coming to any of the following. I look forward to meeting a lot of new people.

10:00 AM – 11:00 AM: Book Store on Second Floor (RSVP on Facebook)
Book Signing: “Managing Online Forums”
Joined by Rohit Bhargava, Senior Vice President of Digital Strategy & Marketing at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. He’s the author of “Personality Not Included” and we’ll both be signing copies of our respective books.

12:15 PM – 1:15 PM: Room 219
Panel: “How to Deal with Trolls, Spammers & Sock Puppets”
Joined by Rick Calvert, Founder of Blog World Expo, John Chow of John Chow dot Com, The Tech Zone and TTZ Media and Jeremy Schoemaker of ShoeMoney.

3:00 PM – 4:00 PM: Room 227
Panel: “Avoiding Disaster: How Not to Use Social Media”
Joined by Lee LeFever of Common Craft, Jason Falls, Social Media Explorer, Doe-Anderson and Blogger, SocialMediaExplorer.com and Darren Rowse, Owner, ProBlogger.net, Co-Founder and VP Training, b5media and Co-Author, “ProBlogger: The Book.”