There's nothing more terrifying than having customers try your product for the first time. Yes! They love it. Whew.

Business 2.0 points out the return of the middle man is here. Major kudos go to CDW. CDW is definitely one of my favorite companies.

Even more interesting, Dave just told me the Weblog Conference Keynote thing all happened in the past 24 hours -- and Dave hasn't yet talked about it on his own weblog. OK, now, if Jupitermedia can get Evan Williams (er, Blogger) and the Trotts (Moveable Type) to come...

Well, now, this is real interesting. Dave Winer has agreed to keynote Alan Meckler's (er, Jupiter Media's) weblog conference says Jupiter Media's analyst/weblogger Michael Gartenberg.

Paul Thurrott tears into the latest Windows Longhorn build that was leaked over the weekend.

My friend Phil Weber, who works at Fawcette, tells me they just turned on an RSS Feed too. Cool. I wish Jim Fawcette had a weblog. I miss our early-morning coffee talks on the way to Peets. Maybe he doesn't want to risk having folks tell him his stuff stinks, though. Fair enough. The rewards go to people who risk their egos. Jim is very smart and his voice would be a really interesting one to hear from -- especially over the next three years since there's a whole new round of chaos heading our way from LAMP, Apple, and Microsoft. By the way, don't know what LAMP stands for? Do a Google search or go over to the Acronym finder.

Update: Phil shows how he implemented the feed in .NET and gives you sample code as well.

Doug Fox, the guy who runs EventWeb, wonders why I'm slamming Meckler's company for doing a weblog conference. I didn't make my point clearly. I'm not slamming him for coming up with the idea. It's a great idea. It's for not talking to webloggers about it. No one knew about this conference. Conferences are all about people, not strategies. If Meckler doesn't get webloggers involved, what makes him think he'll have a success?

Both Joshua Allen and Dori Smith said that I shouldn't judge without getting the other side's story.

Alwin Hawkins says "select the NEC" to his wife. Heh.

Alan Meckler passes the corporate weblogger test. He linked to me, even after I told him his conference plan stank. Why does this pass the corporate weblogger test? Most people are self interested and don't like criticism. Especially CEO's. Most CEO's surround themselves with yes men who'll just do what is told and not listen to harsh criticism coming back. The fact that Meckler listened and valued the feedback enough to link back and explain his position says huge things about what it must be to work for him.

OK, now about Fawcette. If I'm bitter, I'm bitter at myself. Jim Fawcette asked me (and the rest of our team there) three times to develop a conference plan for Enterprise folks. Three times we tried. Three times we failed. At a cost of a LOT of money.

I tried to learn from that failure. We put together brochures. We put together a great group of speakers. We even had great sponsors and partners. But no one came.

Why?

Because an emphasis on all is an emphasis on none.

My conference plans looked almost exactly like the ones Meckler and his team drew up.

What did I fail to take account of? Where did I go wrong?

1) I failed to see that to get people to come to an event, you must take their self interest into account. Most people are told by their boss "go to this event and come back with XYZ knowledge." The problem was, we were trying to cover the entire industry and that meant we didn't cover any one topic in depth, or for more than an hour.

2) I failed to see that there are already great ways to get general overview information on the industry (and, today, with weblogs, there are even more).

3) I failed to come up with a theme that'd get any one group of people interested. If I was smart, I would have done a "Wireless Enterprise" conference, for instance, rather than just an "Enterprise Developer" conference.

4) You might say I failed because the economy wasn't good. You'd be wrong. These tries happened in the middle of the dot come bubble.

5) I failed because I forgot to take a customer -- a single customer -- and develop a show for him/her. Instead, I was thinking of buzz words. Industries. And trying to cover them all. And I kept doing it and not calling my boss on this strategy.

6) I failed because I failed to differentiate my show from any of the others. Mine was a "me too" show and didn't add value over and above the other shows.

7) I failed because I assumed that our past success would get people interested.

8) I failed because I didn't get the right people into the room. I started with a list of technologies. What I should have started with is a list of people.

OK, let's switch gears here. When I was learning to design newspaper pages I learned a rule--if you're going to do a layout of pictures, you must ALWAYS make one picture twice as big as any of the others. Why does this rule work? Because the human mind wants to focus on one thing. If you put them all at the same size, the mind has to work to figure out what's most important.

Apply that to Meckler's list. It's a list of technologies. Yes, it covers the scope of the industry very well. But, then, so does Google. Google does not a conference make. What I had hoped for was that Alan would add some importance. Some value. Maybe he will someday. I'll keep watching cause clearly Alan isn't your usual CEO.

So, what would I have done? I would have looked at the conference a little differently. My goals, if I were Meckler, would be:

1) Do something radically different from Comdex. That way I could continue my anti Captain Smith rants, and be a disruptive technology.

2) Bootstrap. I would take a five year plan. I think Alan is taking too much of a "it's all gotta be this year" approach. A bootstrap plan would allow him to layout his vision of this industry over five years. My goal for this year would be modest -- something like getting 25% of all Comdex attendees to spend at least an hour over at my show. How do you do that? Have something interesting to hear about.

3) Have fun. So far, all Alan has shown us is a list of technology with boring names. No life. No showmanship. No "here's the sessions I'm going to attend" kind of added value.

4) Add some value. Just saying "CTO's should go here" doesn't make sense to me. Which CTO's? The ones from companies that are bigger than 100,000 employees? How about the ones who run businesses with five employees? Aren't their needs going to be different? So, take a much more people-oriented approach. If you were running the technology at a business with five to 50 employees, what is important to see at Vegas? How about if you're the guy at NEC who runs a group with thousands of employees?

5) Tell the industry what's important in the next year. Is it Linux? Say so. Is it Longhorn? Say so. Is it Tivo? Wireless?

6) Don't try to convince Scoble. I'm a geek so will probably come and check out your show no matter what. Instead, talk to the CTO for Boeing or GM. Tell him why he should come (and why he should hang out at your show instead of at Comdex).

Anyway, I wish you all the luck in the world. If you can make the kitchen sink conference plan work, you are a far better man than I am.