I’m on my way home from the ASAE Annual meeting in Nashville after a busy week. Overall, I think the conference was a big success for ASAE and the Center and was pretty good for me as well.
I’ll post a bit more about it once I’m home and have slept for 12 hours. In the mean time, check out the conference blog that I and a bunch of other volunteers contributed to.
Paul Purdue is blogging the end of his business as he closes up shop.
I am doing everything I can to keep the merchant zone up 24/7. I know that a few times it has gone down, and the server has needed to be reset. I’m trying to do that as quickly as I can every time it happens. Of course, the 3 IT staff that used to take care of these issues are no longer here. I’m working to get the alarms that they used to receive diverted to my cell phone.
Pretty intense reading when you imagine yourself in his shoes. It sounds like he is trying to do as much as he can for his customers as he closes down.
(Via Rex Hammond.)
I am participating in ASAE’s Annual Meeting Event blog, which just launched yesterday. My first post there is about a Flickr group we have set up for attendees to use to share photos they take during the event. If you are an association person (or want to be!) I suggest subscribing to this blog to see what is going on at the meeting.
Sue complained about the title of the blog (which is “XtremeASAE Blog”). I have to agree that the X theme is a bit tired these days but, as Jeff pointed out in a comment on Sue’s post, we’re just going with the theme established for the meeting. Rumors of bungee jumping from the top of the Opryland glass dome have no basis in fact whatsoever.
David Weinberger makes an interesting point about the nature of the change that is impacting public relations:
Now I think PR is entering a phase where it sees itself as helping companies with their public relationships. (“Public Relationships — Adding hips to public relations”?) I first heard this term at EdelmanPR (disclosure: to whom I’m a consultant), but I don’t know who coined it. I find the phrase useful because it asserts a connection to traditional PR while pointing to a new dominant possibility. It implies, in line with Tim’s thinking, that PR needs to get out of the intermediation business. It means that more voices have to be allowed to speak from within the corporation, since relationships based on a committee-produced controlled voice will fail. It explains why blogs are such a useful tool: They are public relationships. It assumes there’s persistence to the relationship, not merely press releases thrown in our faces whenever the company has some new crap to flog. It assumes mutuality. It relies on the relationships being based on frankness and transparency.
Earl Mardel has posted a concise contrary view on podcasting. I think cold-water viewpoints like this are always valuable when trying to figure out a new twist on an old medium, which seems to come along daily with the Internet these days.
You may have heard that Microsoft announced recently that they will be building in RSS support to a great extent in their next operating system. Nick Bradbury provides his perspective on the move. He talks about some interesting possible outcomes and how, as a newsreader developer, he isn’t worried about MS eating his lunch, something they have been known to do in the past.
I am speaking to a lunch meeting of the Consortium of Educational Association Publishers today, along with Franklin Bradley who works for the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development. I will be introducing the concept of blogging and how it might be used by associations. Bradley will be doing a case study on how his association recently used an event blog tied to their annual meeting.
I am going to ask the attendees to post their feedback on the session here after we are done.
Here are a set of links for some of the sites and services I will mention during the session.
I would also like to offer a big thank you to FeedBurner, SixApart, Ranchero, and NewsGator for contributing discounts and freebies for me to give away at the session.
Update: Here is the handout from today’s session. I moved it into HTML since the PDF ended up being rather large.
Jon Udell on screencating strategies. Screencasting is nothing too new but I think there are lots of applications (that Jon is exploring) that have not been taken advantage of yet.
Here is a comparison of corporate blogging policies.
On four points, all of the eight most well-known corporate blogging policies agree — corporate bloggers are personally responsible and they should abide by existing rules, keep secrets and be nice. Those four principles are the core of today’s corporate blogging rules.
MIT is conducting a weblog survey. It takes only a few minutes to complete. It is targeted at the authors of weblogs and tries to understand how blogging has influenced their communication activities. From the survey site:
This is a general social survey of the greater weblog community being conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Our goal is to help understand the way that weblogs are affecting the way we communicate with each other. Specifically we are interested in issues of demographics, communication behaviors, experience with weblogs and other technology, and the meaning of various types of social links within the blogosphere.
The survey takes about 15 minutes to complete, and we are asking anyone with a weblog to participate. The larger the sample of individuals we can get, the better our picture of the community will be.
C. David Gammel, CAE 