When it rains it pours association blogs. Here is a blog by Ben Martin where he is writing about his experience as he prepares for the CAE exam. Good luck Ben! Writing about that in public takes guts since you never know if you’ll pass or not. 🙂 Ben, I hope you’ll keep writing long after you get the CAE.
By the way, my study notes for the CAE are posted on this site. They are a couple years old but should still be useful.
Dan Bricklin’s essay on the dynamics of event blogging, based on his experience at the Democratic National Convention, provide some useful thoughts for the bloggers who may cover the ASAE meeting:
What we learn from the Convention blogging:
Event blogging is different than normal, daily blogging. In normal blogging, you watch the world go by and pick and choose things you want to comment upon. There is material online to point to and react to. There are ideas that well up and you take the time to write about, but few people may be waiting for them. There are many, many bloggers. Some read other blogs and choose the posts they think others should read. Through popular gateway blogs like some of the well known political blogs, and tools like Blogdex, Daypop, and more, things bubble to the top.
Events are another thing entirely. The time is very condensed and the amount of information is concentrated. If you are “covering” the event, you have to look at it all and provide perspective to a reader who doesn’t see all of the context that you do. The event marches on and won’t stop for you to take time for thinking and writing. Picking and choosing is harder — if you stop to blog, you might miss the keystone piece of what’s going on.
Good stuff. I know I usually have a hard time just keeping up with voice- and e-mail while at a meeting like this, let alone trying to write something coherent.
The American Society of Association Executives is launching an event blog for their annual meeting in Minneapolis next week. (Not much to see yet.) I’ve been asked to make a small contribution to it during the meeting which I’ll post a pointer to when it goes up. I’m excited that ASAE is experimenting with blogs. Given the sub-domain they have setup it looks like they may have several in the works.
I’ll post here a few times from the meeting as well. Jeff De Cagna sounds like he will be blogging the meeting too. Anyone else?
Update: Mickie Rops will also be blogging from Minneapolis. I created an ASAE Minneapolis blogs wiki page to track all these sites with. Feel free to add to it if you know of others who plan to blog from the meeting.
Peter Van Dijck has posted code to use for forwarding MT entries to WP entries when your MT post URLs do not include post titles. I had to do something similar here on High Context when I migrated from MT to WordPress.
Just noticed this article in my referral links (they kindly link to my site at the end of the piece): Case Study: Why the Air Conditioning Contractors of America’s (ACCA) blog is not cool by Debbie Weil in WordBiz Report.
It’s tempting to say the Air Conditioning Contractors of America (ACCA) has a cool blog. But it wouldn’t be true.
What ACCA, the trade association for 4,000 heating, ventilating and air conditioning companies, has created is a highly efficient way of communicating with its members.
It’s a nice piece that goes through why the ACCA blog was created and how they run it. I liked the message to their members that Kevin Holland launched it with:
ACCAbuzz is a new way we will be communicating with our members and the entire HVACR industry. It gives us an easy way to post quick news items, commentary, and links to articles of interest. As time goes on, ACCAbuzz will become the real nerve center of our website, because it’s here that our staff and members can keep everyone in the loop, ask questions, and get real-time feedback. In announcing this new site to our members, we called it a “daily newsletter on steroids,” because it just keeps growing, all day long!
Also see the page of association blog links on my wiki.
I’ve cut my weblog over to WordPress from MT. Most permalinks and the RSS feed should automatically go to the new location of the content. Let me know if you see any weirdness going on. I’m still working on the categories which are a bit of a mess.
KMpings is still running on MT and should behave as before. I also discovered a couple of posts that I had left in draft mode in MT and forgot about. They are now published here.
Sean Gallagher has published a nice summary of where RSS and ATOM standards and politics are currently
Found via CMSWatch.
Six Apart, the makers of MovableType (used right here) have released their next version which has dramatically altered licensing terms. You can see the furor at the launch annoucement trackbacks. Props to them for leaving TB enabled on that post!
I haven’t gone through the new terms in detail yet but I think that none of the licenses exactly fit the level of activity we see eventually having at work by not allowing enough authors and blogs under the top-end license. I’m sure they would be willing to give us a custom quote and the pricing in general seems reasonable for us at work but we are a rather large non-profit with budget for that kind of thing.
A lot of the outrage is coming from the small shops and independent bloggers. From what I can tell they are definitely not served well by the new licenses.
I’ve disabled the comments on the site for the time being due to continued comment spamming. I had tried the spam plugin for comments a while back but that broke KMpings so I had to back it out. Please use trackback to add comments to an entry or e-mail me and I’ll update the post.
I have left existing comments in place so they can still be viewed.
I’ll investigate the plugin again when I have time and will hopefully provide the comment feature again in the future.
I’ve been a bit of a map geek since getting a minor in geography as part of my BA, so I was pleased to come across this blog the other day: Maps and Territories by Chris Corrigan. His posting style is to add an image of a map with a link to the original and add some text from literature or biographies that tells a bit of a story associated with the place represented by the map. I think it works.
C. David Gammel, CAE 