BeanZ
I’m getting really quite excited about going to this Jupiter Weblogs conference in a few weeks, for a whole bunch of reasons.
1. The speaker list just keeps getting better.
In addition to the top geezers already mentioned, below, they’re also listing: Anil Dash of Six Apart; Userland’s John Robb; Dave Shnaider (former President of ZDNet and founder of Prodigy); both Elizabeth Spiers (Editor of Gawker), who recently delivered a splendid bumslap to a perky PR type who foolishly decided to pitch her blog and the guy at the other end of Gawker’s deliciously understated snarkiness -- Tony "Red Herring" Perkins, now of AlwaysOn; and finally (last but very, very far from least) Halley Suitt - one of the sharpest, freshest writers on the web right now.
Bloody marvellous.
2. It’s in Boston, a city I love, and close enough to our Cambridge office that I may get a chance to pop in and meet some of the most brilliant people (#19) in our network – people I’ve exchanged email with or spoken to by phone, but never met face-to-face.
3. I haven't done one of these things in ages. Back when I was software marketing bloke (before I came over to the dark side as a flack) I got to do a lot of conferences and seminars. Internet World, KMExpo, Seybold, Upside’s Showcase, AIIM, Xplor, AEA - all sorts of fun gigs, getting to meet really smart people. I didn't realise how much I enjoyed this part of the job until it wasn't there any more.
4. As I’m doing research for my panel session, I’m turning up all sorts of terrific examples of both the best and worst possible practices on the battle lines between blogs and PR folk. And I don’t mean “worst practices” in Chris’s sense. Collecting some fantastic stories, and finding some really helpful and thoughtful posts from other people looking at this issue from their different POVs.
In particular, this series of pieces from Jon Udell is well worth reading.
And Stowe Boyd, responding to one of my earlier posts on the subject, makes some really good points, as always. In fact, Stowe’s idea for a new kind of blog-enabled online corporate newsroom has terrific potential. Something worth noodling in deeper deepness…
The only thing I’m not looking forward to is being away from home for the first time since Ruairi was born, and leaving Sausage to cope with all three kids for around 72 hours by herself. Bloody hard work for her. But maybe by then my folks will have arrived from the UK to help out (and perhaps Sausage could even come with me to Beantown – yee ha!)
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