It's time for a personal confession. I had intended to post observations from our most recent seminar "Blogs and Policy Organizations" soon after it ended last month, but other priorities arose, and I never got around to it. On the other hand, now, a few weeks later, it's easy to pull out which speaker observations had the most staying power for me. (Handy rationalization, eh?)

We also now have a 9-minute video clip that reinforces the following points. Plus, the speakers' complete presentations are available as slides and downloadable MP3s as well.

Here are the top four take-aways -- one for each speaker:

Show and Tell Good Stories: If you want journalists to pay attention to your blog posts, tell engaging stories that include lots of illustrative evidence. "Great videos and photos are very important" to catching my eye, said speaker Christine Gorman a veteran journalist at Time Magazine who now blogs for Global Health Report. She underscored this point by showing a set of "before and after" photos of a young boy wasting away from AIDS-related illnesses. The photos starkly showed how antiretroviral drugs quickly and miraculously improved his health. The compelling photos made for an effective blog post, which she eventually shaped into a longer article in the printed Time Magazine.

Use Your Blog to Join the Conversation and Get Noticed: With some 70 million blogs now, you need to get noticed. Blogs benefit most from the conversations they have with one another. Kevin Carey of Education Sector's Quick and the Ed blog noted that if you can get a high-profile blog to link to you, it not only builds awareness, but it validates you. "You have a trusted voice saying here's someone worth listening to,'" Carey said. So the Quick and Ed authors make a point of trying to trying to link to, and converse with, more highly-trafficked blogs with hopes that they will return the favor.

Couple Your Blogging Strategy with Your Organization's Mission: Ginny Simmons of the ONE Campaign steadfastly evangelized her organization's blog department-by-department always keeping Departments were initially reluctant to contribute. Blogging sounded like a lot of extra labor that was irrelevant to their work. Ginny would reply to informational emails from departments and say, hey, that would make a great blog post. It's important to "align your blog with the mission of the organization," Ginny said, "so that success for one turns into success for the other."

A "Blog" Is Whatever Works for Your Organization: Many organizations are afraid to start a blog because they feel that there's a standard model they most follow. They need to be opinionated or must update it every hour of the day, etc. Michael Edson of the Smithsonian's American Art Museum had to overcome similar nay-sayers in launching his museum's Eye Level blog. "There's a lot of purists out there in the blogsphere that think that a blog has to be a particular thing," Michael said. "You have to be controversial, you have to be a curmudgeon. I'm here to say 'bull!' A blog is a serial publishing idiom. And it's up to you guys to decide what makes sense for your organization, if at all."