At some point between Panera and arriving back at the conference hall the transformer on my DC connect cord seems to have bitten the dust. I have checked every connection and all of that seems to be fine, but the transformer is stone cold and my battery indicator shows I only have a little less than 2 hours of battery power remaining, so this may be my last post from the conference and indeed for a while from my laptop until I can buy a replacement power cord.

So, as I mentioned earlier, the “Politics” session was informative, especially with the upcoming elections here locally and in Florida. I don’t usually have a lot of political commentary on here so, while I was interested in the subject over the alternate offering of “Corporate Blogging”, it was not as interesting to me as the “Hyperlocal” session that followed.

As the name implies, “Hyperlocal” dealt with blogs that contain content that is exclusively of local interest. O’Blog is one of the few locally exclusive blogs in Orlando that I am aware of, and even it has content that is mostly of a political nature. In fact it’s author, Bob O’Malley, was the leader of the “Politics” session this morning. There used to be an excellent local blog by some guy who called himself Man About Town that was exclusively about local Orlando issues, entertainment, news, politics, etc. but he seems to have left the building back at the end of July. I miss his unique take on local Orlando subjects. Metroblogging Orlando, a collaborative effort by a group of local bloggers (including yours truly) is a great blog source for local Orlando issues.

The “Hyperlocal” session leaders were 2 bloggers, one from Tampa and one from Jacksonville, and they offered up some excellent advice and interesting anecdotes of their experiences, and then the attendees enjoyed a free-wheeling forum among ourselves regarding experiences and advice, as well as thought-provoking questions about both content, behavior and ethics.

I strolled over to Panera for lunch and enjoyed a small portion of the beauty of Winter Park. I wanted to sit in the park and enjoy a little more, but I also wanted to get back to the hall and get a good seat near an electrical outlet (not that it did me any good; see above).

Right now I’m sitting in the “Legal Issues” session and there is a great discussion going on about liability, privacy and libel issues that bloggers have and may face.

If I don’t have enough power to get back here, thanks for reading my experiences at the BlogOrlando Unconference.