Federated Media, this blog’s media agency, announced this week that they are holding a Conversational Marketing Summit September 11-12 in San Francisco.

From the FM Site:

The Program

The Conversational Marketing Summit brings together leaders in conversational media and marketing for a two-day dialog around the issues, lessons, and opportunities of this emerging medium. Speakers will present actual work from the field, including case studies from:

Brands: Absolut, Cisco, GM, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Nike, Symantec, Virgin
Agencies: Anomaly, Butler Shine, Carat, Ogilvy, OMD, McCann, Starcom
Media: AskANinja, BoingBoing, Digg.com, Duct Tape Marketing, TechCrunch

The attention this event has already drawn from corporate heavyweights like Microsoft, Dell, HP, WebEx, and Ask.com demonstrates how far Federated Media has come in the interactive advertising world. The line up of speakers is a virtual who’s who in new media including executives from Digg.com, MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo, Six Apart, YouTube, Fox, AOL and, well, you get the picture.

I’ll be there and suggest that anyone who wants drink from the new media fire hose should join this conversation as well. This event will sell out!

10:55:58 PM    

Most of the blog platforms have some form of WYSIWYG editor that allows you to log in and create your blog posts using familiar editing tools.

A tool that you may not be as familiar with is the category of software known as desktop blog clients.

A desktop client is a software or service that lets you write your blog content on your computer locally. The advantage to this is that you don’t need to be online, can easily back up and save your posts on your hard drive, can create posts for multiple blogs if you like, and even enhance your post with customized features not available on your blogging platform.

Here are couple of the more popular clients:
• ScribeFire Firefox extension - officially not exactly a desktop client as it works inside of Firefox, but I love it
• Windows Live Writer - This is a great tool and part of the growing Windows Office Live offering
• ecto for MacOSX and Windows - created for Mac users and still the king
• Qumana - both flavors and an ad posting revenue model

1:17:05 AM