The first quarterly Phoenix Active Rain Bloggers meeting hosted by Brian Brady played to a packed room this morning - check Brian's blog post for the complete details.

Greg Swann of BloodhoundBlog was in attendance.  It was clear from the first few sentences that this was someone who has much to share about blogging - strategy, linking, philosophy and much more.

As we went around the room Greg had specific incisive advice for the other attendees, that will likely save days if not months of "do it yourself" research on our own.

One theme that Greg reinforced to us all was that credibility is paramount - lose that and you've lost it forever.  Many of his posts take the "Discrepancy + Truth = Blog Post" approach - which identifies fibs from the mainstream media, identifies the truth, and in one instance resulted in a retraction just yesterday (I think) by one of the media "big boys"!

Greg referred several times to Chris Anderson's "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More " which I took to be a recommendation - fortunately it's something just arrived from Amazon so it move to the top of the stack!

One of the notable quotes from Greg was "If Dustin Luther is the Water, then all others are the Wave" referencing Dustin Luther of RainCityGuide.com.

Others in attendance included the notable Jay Thompson (The Phoenix Real Estate Guy)and Jonathan Dalton (Dalton's AZ Homes) who provided insight into how and why they started blogging and how they have traveled far in such a short time.  I'm not going to steal their thunder here - so check out their blogs (linked above) for their own musings!

Brian Brady "I'll never buy donuts for real estate agents" did just that this morning, along with juice and bagels, and The Marriott Group looks forward to the second meeting - sometime next quarter!