This week in Boston the Pubcon conference kicked off with the Boston Marathon and a keynote from Malcolm Gladwell. The conference covered a lot of ground including a session on blogs, podcasting and RSS.

On Tuesday, the “Blogging, Pod Casting and RSS Feeds” session included Dr. Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit, Daron Babin of New Gen Media, Brian Prince of BOTW as well as Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo and Matt Cutts of Google for the Q and A.

The mechanics of blogging and marketing blogs included alternative uses for RSS, blog and feed optimization, plugins, promotion and blog metrics. Babin discussed the pros and cons of podcasting with practical insight based his experience with the explosive growth of WebmasterRadio.FM.

The Q and A brought up the blurring line between what is a blog and what is a web site with the search engine reps defending their performance at indexing blogs. There was also a good question about whether to convert a whole site to a blog platform or to just add a blog to the existing site. Jeremey Zawodny’s response was to pick the right tool for the job based on your needs whether it’s forum software or blog or a content management system.

Here’s more detailed coverage of the Blogs, RSS and Podcasts session.