On September 27, nearly 300 local bloggers and journalists gathered in Orlando, Florida for BlogOrlando3. Phil Gomes and I headed south from Chicago and each led a session—Phil talked about internal training and I talked about search skills. Along with the other participants, both came away with global lessons from this highly successful hyper local unconference.

This week we thought we would share some of the case studies and lessons from BlogOrlando3.

1. The day opened with a keynote from Jake McKee, aka The Community Guy, titled How LEGO Caught the Cluetrain. Jake spent five years as the community manager for the well known children’s toy and helped the company move into a much more social space. Here is the video of his keynote and one blogger’s reflections on his session.

2. Geno Church from Brains On Fire in South Carolina led a session about the creation of the Fiskateers online community. Fiskateers is a site supported by Fiskars scissors and is 5,000 members strong. The community was built on the fan cycle of “participation, evangelism, and ownership.”

3. Etan Horowitz, a journalist from the Orlando Sentinel, led a session about Twitter and Journalism. The conversation in Orlando echoed conversations in Chicago about how to use Twitter. Journalists are using it for finding sources and story ideas, staying in touch with community, crowd sourcing and live coverage, promotion and visibility.

4. The final keynote of the day was given by Erik Hersman, aka White African. Erik, raised in Sudan and Kenya, lives in central Florida but helps bring stories of African technologies to life on his blogs and his work. AfriGadget focuses on solving everyday problems with African ingenuity. White African is his personal blog focused on high-tech mobile and web technology change in Africa. The stories he shared were great windows into a tech community that rarely makes the front page.

5. Erik’s third site deserves to stand alone. Ushahidi is an open source mobile mapping project that was creating to map reports of violence during the recent elections in Kenya. The international team of developers is working to create the simplest way to collect data during a crisis using text messages and mapping software. It has also been deployed in South Africa and has global possibilities.