Have I joined the Weblog Neighborhood? Yahoo!

I thought about putting the matrix (aka the schedule for the Web Builder Conference) up here, and decided not to. Why? Cause it'd cause too much stop energy. I'm getting notes from amazing people (I don't even want to tell you who they are, but because Dave Winer linked to me yesterday the quality of my speaker pool has quadrupled in 24 hours). Keep sending me ideas! The energy that's going right now is very good.

I spent the last few hours just digging around Amazon.com's site.

You know, Amazon is an amazing place for a conference planner. Right there Amazon tells you what's hot and what's not in almost any topic you can think of. I like looking at buying behavior. I've found that the buying behavior of conference attendees often mirrors that of the book-buying public too.

It takes committment to buy a book.

So, tonight, I made a list of all the top-selling and best-rated book authors in the Web Design and related fields. Wow, if I get only 1/4 of these people as speakers this will be a killer conference to go to.

I like reading the reviews that are on Amazon. Yeah, I know that there are a few that are not reliable, but if you take the whole of all the reviews on a particular book and throw out the really bad ones and the really good ones, you get a pretty good picture of what normal people think of the book.

Good book authors don't always make good conference speakers. But, you can't fake your way through a book. If I hired nothing but book authors, at least I'd get people who knew their topics well. I'd rather have someone on stage who knows their topic well, than have a showman who "wow's" an audience, but doesn't know shit about his/her topic. I've had showmen on stage and they almost always get found out sooner or later.

My reputation is on the line here, so I'm only gonna hire people who know their stuff. It's pretty easy to discern. Protecting myself from showmen is one reason I wrote this speaker FAQ. It lists how I pick speakers. I try to be objective and not just automatically pick my friends (lots of conference planners pick their friends -- I've fired people who were fun to drink with, but who didn't know their topics).

One question I get sometimes is "if we buy a sponsorship, will you put me on stage?"

That's a tough question. I think I would, but it would be pretty obvious which session that would be. I'd try to keep it in a "sponsored breakfast session" if at all possible (each conference planner has its own policies on selling keynotes). I doubt that much money will get thrown around a Web conference this year.

It pisses me off when I get a sales pitch on stage for something.

That's one reason I look at book authors. They know their product, but they probably aren't responsible for selling that product.

Anyway, enough rambling for tonight. More on the conference over the next few days.