About 5 months ago I was blogging away and something struck me “there is no tradeshow for blogging!” At least not a tradeshow for all bloggers that I could find. (I produce very big tradeshows for a living). Sure there were lots of great events but they each addressed a particular niche BlogHer, the Blog Business Summit (a very cool event btw), or Yearly Kos for example. I wanted to go to something that had everything any blogger could ever want. From publishing platforms, to broad band providers, to lap tops to badges, widgets and plug ins, to a dozen other things I could think of off the top of my head. It seems everyday I come across some new product or service that Bloggers use /want/need.

Of course I would also want all of my blogging questions answered like how do I get a certain plug in to work right, How do I work this newsreader thingy?, What exactly is RSS and why does everybody tell me I need it? How do I get more people to read my blog? And thats just the basic stuff. Analytics, Search Engine Optimization, Affiliate Programs, Ad networks, it goes on and on.

I think you see where this is going. I told a very good friend, former boss and one of the best tradeshow people I know about my idea and her response was “I want in and we have to launch this show right now!”

We held our idea very closely but we had to approach several important vendors before we made our announcement. We also needed to find a couple investors. It didn’t take long before we recognized a pattern. Every person we told about this idea had the same response “I Want In!”. Now when everyone you know in your professional life has this kind of reaction to your idea, especially when many of them have heard a million ideas and worked thousands of shows you know you are on to something.

We named the show BlogWorld right out of the gate. It’s just something us tradeshow people do. There is a world for just about every industry you can think of.

When I started telling a few of my closest blogger friends about the idea they were all excited as well. However several people told me you have to include all new media. The techy bloggers and business bloggers said you have to include social media. Sounds good to me. It’s all related and blogging is really just the tip of the iceberg. Vlogging, podcasting, internet radio, social networks, and who knows what in the future is going to continue to change the way people get their news and make buying decisions.

So the name has evolved to what you see today. BlogWorld & New Media Expo.

In the upcoming days I will be posting more about how this show came about and dropping a lot of names of people we have gotten involved. But I will sign off for now and look forward to hearing what my fellow bloggers have to say and to seeing all 57 million of you in Las Vegas next year. Particularly the 30 million sploggers out there. I never met a robot before and I’m curious to see what you guys look like.

Oh by the way, it seems like good karma to me that Confabb launched yesterday. From Marshall @ Tech Crunch:

Confabb is a new service launching today that offers a centralized place to find information about all kinds of conferences. The site offers everything from speaker and event reviews to photos of the events after the fact through integration with Flickr. It’s an impressive full service site that could become the go-to spot for at least tech conference attendees and possibly a wider audience.

and from Scobleizer:

Since I’ve been involved in planning, attending, or speaking at dozens of conferences and expos and other events this was very interesting to me.

Is this a cool demo? Nah, not like last week’s Photosynth. Will it put Microsoft out of business? Nah. But is it something that you will probably use? I think so, at least if you’re going to go to a conference.

I’ll definitely use it to update the CES 2007 site on Confabb and add mention of our BlogHaus, which will be in the Bellagio there (Seagate, Microsoft, and AMD are sponsoring that).

I have of course already submitted BlogWorld & New Media Expo.