Archive for January, 2006

January 24, 2006

Unorganizing

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Can an unconference be organized? Or would that be considered unorganized? BrainJams aims to find out, and they’re having one in DC on Monday. More at Social Twister.

January 22, 2006

Does Design Matter?

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With the advent of RSS and syndication — technologies that divorce “content” from the “container” — many folks have decided that design, in particularly blog/webpage design, doesn’t matter that much anymore. People are only going to read your content in their newsreader (or Bloglines page, or MyYahoo, or whatever), so what difference does it make if your site looks terrible (or your blog looks like every other blog template out there)?

Except, of course, in order to read your content in their newsreader, they first have to decide to subscribe to it … and new research shows that web viewers decide on a site’s credibility in 1/20th of a second. They’re not evaluating your content in those 50 milliseconds. (Hat tip: Andy Wibbels.)

January 22, 2006

Excuses, Excuses

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I wasn’t going to bore you with the usual “sorry I haven’t been posting for a while” thing but since it’s been over a month, I feel like I owe at least some explanation. So, here are my two: 1) I’ve been really, really busy, and 2) Coffee and laptops don’t mix. Remember that last one the next time you perch a mammoth-sized latte precariously next to your keyboard. I know I will.

January 22, 2006

Got a Match?

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Had a freewheeling conversation with a former association colleague and current good friend over drinks the other night (and the more drinks we had, the more freewheeling we got). One of the things we laughed about was the tendency of organizations (not just associations) to jump on bandwagons — even in those cases when it only takes a few seconds to realize that a particular bandwagon is missing a wheel or two.

Case in point: “matchmaking” for meetings. These are the programs that encourage attendees to an event to list their “interests” so they can be “matched” with similar attendees to encourage networking, peer learning, etc.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the concept in and of itself is a good one. Most of us agree that the most useful outcomes of conferences or meetings are those that come from conversations with other people (the so-called “hallway track”). If we can bottle that sort of thing up and make it easier, we should have a more successful meeting for our attendees, right?

Except the way some conferences are doing it now is not necessarily making it easier. I can only go on my own experience here, and to be honest, I haven’t paid too much attention to these programs. However, it seems that the events I’ve been to that tried this all required me to go to some website and enter my interests or issues, so I could then be told what other registered attendees most closely matched. There are three things I’ve noticed about these programs.

1. Since these are all associations I’ve belonged to for quite some time, why do I have to tell them what my interests are? Why don’t they already know what my interests are?

2. What am I supposed to do with a list of attendees?

3. Just because someone may have the same interests as me doesn’t mean they have anything useful to teach me. That probably sounds harsher than I mean it. What I mean is, how useful is a list of people’s interests/issues without any context? There are lots of things I’m interested in that I don’t know anything about. There are a few other things I’m interested in that I’ve got a lot of experience in. The same is true of everybody else.

Perhaps there are organizations that have solved these problems. In which case, I’d love to hear about it.

The truth is that associations are in the matchmaking business — we make connections between members. Or so we say; are we really doing it? If so, we wouldn’t need a standalone program for a conference or tradeshow. Members would already be making connections and making plans to meet in Vegas. If we want to make it easier for them to meet up in Vegas, we should be focusing on building connections all year long.

Perhaps what each association needs is a MySpace for their members.