December 20, 2005

2005 Association Inc. “Why Not?” Awards

Posted by Kevin | Print This Article

And here are the 2005 Association Inc. “Why Not?” Awards (as in, “Hey, I can give out awards. Why not?”). I should call them the “Utterly Meaningless, Completely Random, Off-the-top-of-my-head Awards.”

Best Rebranding. The merger of Association Management and Executive Update magazines resulted in a new magazine, Associations Now. This is admittedly a comparative award because they’d originally decided to call it “Association Leadership,” a name which sounds very old-school. (I read an association exec write somewhere else, I forget who and where, that it sounded like a name one of their committees would have thought up.) Associations Now is a much better name (and the magazine itself is off to a very interesting, and more importantly useful, start.)

Best Speaker at the ASAE Conference. Stan Slap, hands down.

Most Interesting Trend. Podcasting — not in and of itself, but the fact that associations seem so much more interested in podcasting than blogging (when in fact, good podcasts are a lot harder to create and maintain than good blogs).

Best Off-the-Cuff Remark. David Gammel mentioning in a conference call that association bloggers don’t make up so much a “blogosphere” as a “blogoclump” — thus giving us a collective name.

Best Blogoclump Blog Post. This is hard and I can’t pick one. So I’ll just call attention to three posts that I found thought-provoking: Jamie Notter on the power of incompetence; Jeff De Cagna at Association Renewal introducing the DUMB concept; and Chris Bailey on “handsy” management styles.

Best Association-Sponsored Blog. Pat Cleary’s Manufacturer’s Blog.

Most Improved Blogoclump Blog. Ben Martin, who in the year since completing his CAE certification (which his blog was started to chronicle) has cast a wider net.

Best Commenter. Jeff De Cagna, who keeps the conversation going in the blogoclump with his frequent (and always interesting) comments.

Best Web Watcher. Sue Pelletier. Where does she find all this great stuff?

Best Conversation About Something That Is Actually Going to Be Important. The unconference, which was discussed by several bloggers, but which can be summed up in David Gammel’s post here.

Best Non-Association Blogger Post About Something Related to Associations. Rich Westerfield on “Associations: Worth It Or Not?”

Best A-list Blogger Post About Something Related to Associations. Seth Godin on conferences that suck.

Most Annoying Web 2.0 Trend. You mean besides calling everything “Web 2.0″? It would have to be the fact that everything is “beta.” If it’s beta, then keep it behind the $#@%ing firewall.

Most Eye-rollingly Bad Attempt at Apologizing. Steve Rubel’s post comparing TypePad’s problems to eBay in the late 90s, despite the fact that 1) eBay had no real competitors back then (while TypePad faces many, many competitive technologies, the best of which — WordPress - is open source), and 2) we’re paying TypePad just to keep our blogs up, while eBay operated off its users’ sales — and their downtime was costing them money just like their users.

My Best Speaking Experience. They’ve all been great, but had a very fun time at an IABC panel moderated by Debbie Weil along with folks from GM and Intuit.

My Best Blogging Experience. Participating in the ASAE Conference show blog.

Here’s to an even more interesting 2006!

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