Bill Brandon: Conferences

Mon, 10 Nov 2003 20:18:36 GMT

http://blogoehlert.typepad.com/eclippings/
2003/11/techlearn_trip_.html

Mark Oehlert lets us know that Michael Parmentier's notes from the recent TechLearn 2003 are now online. Having tried to produce conference notes myself, I am awed at the thoroughness and real usefulness of these notes. One can actually get a sense of what each of the speakers was focused on, and even an overall sense of the conference. A great model to emulate in the future. - SWL

[EdTechPost]

BloggerCon I (October 4-5, 2003)

Sat, 04 Oct 2003 21:08:06 GMT

Reports from BloggerCon in Boston.

Running commentary from Roland Tanglao.

Photos from Dan Bricklin

Favorite Bits from Betsy Devine: Education Panel, Journalism Panel

Looks like a good conference, in that a lot of movers and shakers showed up, along with a few regular folks. The next question is, what comes out of this? It looks like some of the panelists are asking that, too, amid the self-congratulatory backslapping. Is this the start of The Next Big Thing, is it Friends of Dave W, or is it just a Saturday morning meeting of hobbyists? My guess is that it's something between the first two. (This just in: there is another view.)

But next year's event will need to be structured differently and to break new ground if it is going to grow, and not backslide toward becoming another SuperSaturday. Apologies to those not from Dallas -- SuperSaturday was a huge geek meeting that went on in the InfoMart hear from the early 80's well into the 90's, mainly for hobbyists. It may still be going on, I'm a bit out of touch. Not that good things don't happen at such meetings, but they don't lead anywhere.

I am very hopeful for BloggerCon, though sometimes it might not sound like it because I criticized the $500 fee and the location (which guaranteed it would be attended mostly by locals and by the wealthy or those in a position to make a lot of money from the blogging movement). Fifteen years ago, I helped start a series of conferences for technical trainers that continues to this day. Millions of dollars have been made because of what a handful of people got started, and nobody had much confidence in us, either, at the time.

Sat, 20 Sep 2003 15:40:08 GMT

Universal calls for papers collector.

As Liz wrote, this is an amazingly useful site for academics. I picked the areas Artificial intelligence & Related Technologies, Information Technology and Information Systems, Knowledge, Library and Information Sciences, and the keywords "learning", "knowledge", "web", "weblogs", and "online".

It’s called Papersinvited, and it collects calls for papers from conferences and journals worldwide.

When you register, you create a profile and tell the system what topic areas you’re interested in following. In addition to the existing topical categories (I subscribe to “Library and Information Sciences,” “Knowledge Management,” “Communication,” “Digital Arts,” and “Internet and Online Services”), you can specify up to five keywords to look for in announcements (I have “weblogs,” “blogs,” “social software,” “gender,” and “women”).

Each time you log in, it shows you current announcements in the areas you’ve selected. You can delete them if you’re not interested, or add them to a planner, which is a calendar that shows you upcoming submission dates, notification dates, and conference dates.

[Seb's Open Research]

MS Live Meeting falls short of plans

Tue, 16 Sep 2003 18:57:24 GMT

MS Live Meeting misses the mark.

If you adopt Live Meeting as your standard for synchronous conferencing or training, be aware of the potential issues.

Live Meeting shows that Microsoft has work to do. Microsoft Corp. on Monday introduced a Web conferencing service -- and although it features minor integration with the company's enterprise products, the service falls quite short of the company's plan to offer its collection of collaboration software as an integrated package. [InfoWorld: Top News]

Thu, 29 May 2003 04:38:03 GMT

Google Page Rank Put To The Test.
News on Google
How much does Google Page Rank really matter? Having a PR6 or a PR0 does it really matter? What do people do to warrant a PR0, and can a website recover from a PR0 to regain a PR6? And if a website is awarded a PR0 how does it affect referrals from Google? How do the results pages reflect changes in the Page Rank Rating of webpages in a PR0 website? These questions and more Microdoc News is ready to find out. The Microdoc News site is put to the test once more. Everyone seems to know the theory and there are advisors out there who can tell you about page rank, but how many have actually put page rank to the test and observed first-hand what effects page rank really has on a site? [Elwyn Jenkins: MicrodocHeadlines] [John Lawlor: John Lawlor - business-blog consulting]

Thu, 29 May 2003 04:37:11 GMT

Tips About Setting up Online Events.

ChannelSeven.com: The Elegant Online Event

WebTrends' Director of Marketing Brent Hieggelke has been a driving force at NetIQ for the development of online events. Since his hiring in spring 2000, the product division has launched and steadily grown its investment in Webcasts. This year, it will produce four or five of them -- compared to approximately nine live events per quarter. [...]

Michael Kushner, director of integrated media solutions for Reed Business Communications, has been at the helm of several sponsored events and knows that getting the look and sound right is a prerequisite for spurring attention.

"For our sponsors, it's all about lead generation. I don't want to go to them with egg on my face and say we had five streams," Kushner said. He has found that tending to production values is key to preventing that.

Web conferences and webcasts are a cost-effective way to handle prospects that are quite interested in your offering (and probably quite far in the sales cycle already,) but are not ready to travel. That said, this article reminds us that attention to proper production values and technical details matters a lot.

[MarketingFix] [John Lawlor: John Lawlor - business-blog consulting]

Thu, 29 May 2003 04:36:33 GMT

How to Turn Webinars Into Sales Leads.

MarketingSherpa: When Traditional Software Marketing Tactics Fail, Try Adding Workshops to Your Web Site

A detailed look at how a software vendor in the commercial mortgage industry uses educational material such as online workshops to detect new business.

[MarketingFix] [John Lawlor: John Lawlor - business-blog consulting]

Thu, 29 May 2003 04:35:51 GMT

7 Tips to Increase Your Site's Ability to Get Leads.

ClickZ: Challenge: Get More Leads by Next Friday

Here's what this article suggests you do to improve your site's ability to collect leads from its visitors:

Message Must be Relevant (Identify the benefits and value your products or services confer)

No Jargon

Don't "We" All Over Yourself (The first rule of online success is it's never about you)

Keep It Need-to-Know (Ask for as little information as possible)

Help Them See It (Evaluate text scannability)

Qualify Better (Let visitors know briefly who you are, what you do, and what you offer)

Test, Measure, and Optimize

[MarketingFix]

[John Lawlor: John Lawlor - business-blog consulting]

Thu, 01 May 2003 05:29:29 GMT

Connecting people.

Presentation by Doug Ransom on April 16, 2003. [via syndic8.com]

Sun, 27 Apr 2003 18:38:08 GMT

Webby Awards ceremony canceled. The poor economy and fears about traveling are blamed for the cancellation of the normally flamboyant ceremony. Instead, the winners will be announced on the Internet. [CNET News.com]

Thu, 24 Apr 2003 21:19:13 GMT

Am getting interest in how blogs can improve the "take away" value of conferences. Stay tuned.

Emerging Tech. At the Emerging Technology conference in Santa Clara. Lots of other folks are blogging, so I'll just listen. Bloggers of... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

[Jim Flowers: Blogs and Education]

Tue, 15 Apr 2003 04:37:37 GMT

Get Boss to Sign-off on Registration Fee.

Well at least one conference organizer is having fun with weblogs! The Gnomedex producers have created a PowerPoint slide show so that you have a marketing tool to convince your boss to fork over the already-low registration fee.

Get Your Company to Pay for Gnomedex!. Thanks to the efforts of Lori and Jason, you now have the ultimate tool for convincing your supervisors to let you come to Gnomedex. Just download this ready-to-go PowerPoint Presentation and force your boss(es) to watch it. Heck, maybe they'll... [Gnomedex 3.0]

[Doug Fox -- The Future of Meetings]

Mon, 14 Apr 2003 14:57:19 GMT

Blogging Links Resource Guide. I've just uploaded my first draft of Blogging Links. On this page, you'll find hundreds of categorized links to weblog publishing, mobile blogging, blogging search engines and related resources and articles. Please comment and let me know if there are other resources that I should add. [Doug Fox -- The Future of Meetings]

Mon, 14 Apr 2003 03:50:45 GMT

Lawrence Lessig (Stanford Law School) posts on digital rights and on public domain

Digital rights expression (DRE) vs. Digital rights management (DRM) [Lawrence Lessig]

Weblogs and the public domain [Lawrence Lessig]

The Creative Commons License ("expressing freedom beyond fair use") [Lawrence Lessig]

"What politicians need to remember is that Congress has always adjusted the rules by which creators get paid as a response to new technology. That’s just what they should be doing today. Never before has the law been used to force new technology into old way of doing business. Every time before this, it was the law that adjusted to assure artists got paid given the new technology." [Lawrence Lessig]

Sun, 13 Apr 2003 19:21:48 GMT

Creative Commons, RSS, and Manila

Further to earlier posts today about open source and Doc Searls.

"This document shows you how to use a Creative Commons license in the RSS feed generated from a Manila weblog.

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization run by several universities that makes it easy for creative people and organizations to share their work with more options than are provided by copyright.

Aggregators and feed readers should consider the presence of the element, but it should also be understood that, at this writing, this is a new feature in the RSS world. We must allow software designers time to think and discuss to see how the presence of a CC license will be utilized by their software.

We will of course also do an equivalent feature for Radio UserLand. According to Larry Lessig, Moveable Type already supports Creative Commons in RSS. " [Manila]

This, in my opinion, is a good (no, great) example fo figuring out a fair balance between technology and intellectual property rights, and thereby avoiding endless litigation, cease-and-desist orders, etc.

Sun, 13 Apr 2003 18:55:29 GMT

What is "trackback" about?

Trackback has been mentioned a lot lately in blogs, and I didn't know what it was. Here is the explanation.

Sun, 13 Apr 2003 16:55:09 GMT

More issues on DMCA and access [Blogs and Education]

This one bears some thinking about. On the one hand, there is no doubt that there are conflicts between intellectual property rights and the ability of people to communicate via technology on the Web and internet. On the other hand, there is also no doubt that a lot of "hiss-"trionics and polemics are being launched by both sides instead of trying to figure out the answer.

The fight seems to get nastiest when it involves companies in a fight for market share with only one or two major competitors, and academics who seem to feel there is no justification for private ownership of intellectual property, period. (My opinion, ok?)

I like open source more all the time.

Sun, 13 Apr 2003 13:11:01 GMT

We Can't Keep Meeting Like This

Good posts from Doug Fox this morning on the future of associations, on Meetup, and the value of face-to-face meetings. [The Future of Meetings]

Thu, 10 Apr 2003 14:34:42 GMT

Analysis of Public Wi-Fi Pricing Models.

John Yunker explores the pricing models for public Wi-Fi hot spots. It will be interesting to see what happens with Wi-Fi pricing, especially at hotels and convention centers, as the number of hot-spots grow like crazy over the next year.

Pyramid Asks, What Happens When Pricing Drops?. John Yunker of Pyramid Research notes that even optimistic projections of venue revenue today for hot spots relies on pricing staying constant over time: The latest free Wi-Fi newsletter from Pyramid covers some of the latest news, but leads off with Yunker's analysis of dropping prices from the venue's standpoint. He says, Current revenue share models value the network far greater than the location. I say, the hot spot business is about real estate and software, not about the technology.... [Wi-Fi Networking News]

[Doug Fox -- The Future of Meetings]

Thu, 10 Apr 2003 14:33:22 GMT

Wi-Fi, Weblogs and IM at Tech Conference.

First story in this Wired article describes the use of Wi-Fi, weblogs and instant messaging at a tech conference.

Wireless Really Goes to Work. In hospitals, at conferences, on farms and at theme parks, people are putting wireless technology to work in unprecedented ways. By Jessie Scanlon from Wired magazine. [Wired News]

[Doug Fox -- The Future of Meetings]

Thu, 10 Apr 2003 14:31:08 GMT

Geotargeting Opportunities.

Article from ClickZ on the value of geotargeting. In other words the benefits of being able to target your message to prospects in a specific geographical region. To date, I don't think there are many organizers of seminar programs, conferences or events that target their web-based ads or content exclusively to people within a specific geographical region.

Geotargeting: Why It Matters to Marketers [ClickZ]

[Doug Fox -- The Future of Meetings]

Thu, 10 Apr 2003 04:29:18 GMT

Gammel on Trackbacks.

Dave Gammel offers suggestion to my earlier post about how to take advantage of trackbacks in order to aggregate all the posts about a specific session or track at a conference.

Dave, I'm going to install Movable Type soon on my server so I can experiment with different set-ups for creating discussions about educational programs taking place at conferences.

I'm using Radio now. I'm not sure how flexible it is in terms of creating trackbacks - there's probably a way to do it but I doubt it is as easy as Movable Type. From reading the MT documentation, it seems easier.

More on TrackBack for Meetings.

From Doug Fox:

Let's say that I'm producing an upcoming conference and tradeshow in six months. I could post each educational session as a separate weblog entry in my weblog. This way any interested participants or prospect could 1) subscribe to these feeds of session and updated session information, and 2) comment on any of the educational sessions before the program started.

That would definitely work.

Another option would be to create a trackback category (only MT offers this currently, as far as I know) for each session and allow anyone to ping it and subscribe to an RSS feed of the pings. The conference organizers could ping that same category for any updates to the session. A category for the entire show should be created to keep meta info out of the specific session channels.

Potential down-side: ping spam. Many people have predicted it as a problem and I would imagine that a conference with TB might be high profile enough to gather a fair amount. KMpings, which I host, has not gotten a lot of ping spam but it may be niche enough to not attract it. A conference where exposure = $ could definitely get some.

Perhaps pings could be moderated somehow in a future version of MT?
[High Context]

[Doug Fox -- The Future of Meetings]

Tue, 08 Apr 2003 16:33:28 GMT

Open Standards for Conference Marketing

Doug Fox is looking for a way to syndicate conference announcements, through a service like Weblogs.com . Interesting.

Mon, 07 Apr 2003 15:58:17 GMT

Conference Session Commenting and Aggregation.

We need a major upgrade for this RSS syndication at it relates to conferences and educational programs.

I was just reading post by Anil Dash about a session he's doing at Voice on the Net Conference.

Anil links to the conference page with the session descriptions and times, but this is not nearly enough information. We need to turn all session descriptions for all publicly-accessible events into RSS feeds. This way speakers and attendees could easily comment on sessions they will attend, are attending or have attended - the same goes for speakers as well.

Right now, there is no convenient way for presenters/attendees to reference educational sessions. As a result, we all lose out because we can't build on comments that people have about specific educational programs. It would be a lot easier if I could subscribe to RSS feeds for specific types of educational sessions that were of interest to me. And then I could quickly comment on selected sessions.

In addition we need some type of aggregation and metadata system so that we can link educational programs and related posts about these programs in some coherent way. Say for example, I want to find all educational sessions and related weblog posts about how to set-up a Wi-Fi network. There is no fast, easy way to do this. But if conference producers, attendees and speakers agreed on some type of trackback mechanism or metadata system for aggregating and publishing RSS feeds, then we could solve this problem. Maybe others can help me with this?

[Doug Fox -- The Future of Meetings]

Mon, 07 Apr 2003 15:56:49 GMT

Creating Topics in RSS.

Matt Mower has post that caught my attention on Exploring Topics in RSS 2.0. I don't have enough background in working with RSS to understand the details, but I like the idea: how do you implement a process for encoding topic information within your weblog posts.

By adding topic information to posts, it is then possible to connect posts from multiple users who are talking about the same subject matter. Getting back to the world of meetings, I think it would be great if there was some type of naming convention or protocol - I don't know right terminology here - so that a blogger could identify a specific post with 1) a specific conference and 2) a specific topic being covered at the conference. This way other bloggers could then quickly find all posts that were made regarding a specific educational program at an event.

Even better, let's say that attendees at upcoming meeting are sharing their thoughts via their blogs about a program in which they will be participating. It would be helpful, if a person who was thinking about registering for the event could tap into this on-going, distributed conversation by being able to access this threat. If the topics were categorized in some logical manner, it would be much easier to find these threads.

So I'm hoping to set-up some type of demonstration of this topic management system for a conference so that I and others can see how this might work.

Topics in RSS. Exploring topics in RSS2.0.

I've been doing some thinking about how to encode topic information into RSS2.0 feeds. As a simple test of the Radio callback facility I have implemented a very simplistic protocol. Within each <item> is a tag

<topic id="topic_id" type="topic-type" source="url">topic name</topic>

for each topic associated with the item (post). A concrete example (using the rsstopics namespace):

<rsstopics:topic rsstopics:id="the_state" rsstopics:source="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/topicsT.html#the_state" rsstopics:type="generic">the state</rsstopics:topic>

Whilst this does have the advantage that it's simple and direct it's also a bit silly to invent a new format for topic information when we have two standard culprits available already:

Resource Description Framework (RDF)

XML Topic Maps (XTM)

....

I have described approaches using RDF, XTM and a hybrid of the two. Each has advantages and disadvantages although I believe the hybrid makes the best use of both formats.

I'd welcome comments and or opinions from interested parties.

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

I'll spare you all the details - but any interested parties - who'd like to help Matt bake topics into RSS - should check out this post and contact Matt. This is REAL important stuff.
[Marc's Voice]

[Doug Fox -- The Future of Meetings]