If you’re wondering who’s hiring in special events now, and why, check out this article, which just so happens to be titled Who’s Hiring in Special Events Now–And Why. Some good news is that Special Events found 17 percent of the companies surveyed were planning to hire new employees.

Just in case your meeting’s registration line ever backs up, this article from today’s Boston Globe will give you a little perspective: Standing in line: The case for our least-favorite activity. I must say that I never looked at waiting in line as a “masterpiece of social cohesion and a civilizational building-block” before!

I love it when people live what they are passionate about. Take my colleague Barbara Scofidio, editor of Corporate Meetings & Incentives,. She has been writing about meetings that give back to their host communities, and meetings-related organizations that help their local communities, for what seems like forever.

Now she’s put together a microsite where planners who want to incorporate giving back into their meetings and incentives can go for ideas, tips, how to’s, case studies, resources — and she is committed to continue adding to the site any time she hears of a new idea to share. Go ahead, check out http://meetingsnet.com/give-back/, and if you have anything to share, drop Barbara an e-mail.

Click on the photo to enlarge it, then tell me — is this not the best airplane paint job ever? It’s brought to you by Kulula, South Africa’s low-cost airline. (Thanks to Chris Rawlinson!)

Mike McCallen offers some interesting insights on events he gleaned from the gazillion-ticket-selling movie Avatar. Just what you need to know to make your next meeting a blockbuster (well, this info plus a few hundred million ought to do it).

Just a friendly reminder to get your data in for the 2009 CEIR Index. It should be quick and easy to do, and you’ll get a free copy of the results for participating if you get your data input by this Friday.

Some headlines that caught my eye this morning:

IATA: Airline industry will take at least 3 years to recover

Canada eases carry-on restrictions

Air France may give obese passengers a break

And last, but certainly not least: London’s newest tourist attraction - ABBAWORLD

I’m in town for the Alliance for Continuing Medical Education annual conference, and this place is rocking. Well, it’s always rocking, but add the Saints win on top of a growing Mardi Gras fever and the energy is amazing. Saints flags are flying from every car antenna, and a parade went by my window at the Marriott at the Convention Center a little while ago. I could more hear than see it (actually, I even felt the walls shake a bit with the drumbeats) so I’m not entirely sure what it was all about, but it was so very NOLA.

I’ll be mainly posting about the ACME meeting over at the Capsules blog for the next few days, but it just feels good to be back in the Big Easy. Plus it’s a whole lot warmer here than back home in the frozen Northeast!

Royal Caribbean is taking a lot of heat over its decision to continue to bring passengers to its private beach at Labadee, about 100 miles up the coast from earthquake-shattered Port-au-Prince. Never mind that it donated a million bucks to the relief efforts, and is bringing in aide and supplies along with passengers — to most, it may look like, as David Letterman, said, something only “idiot cruise ships” would do. But it’s not so simple to deride the decision if you look beyond the first gut reaction.

I think that Royal Caribbean is doing the best it can under horrible circumstances; it’s just that we’re all really uncomfortable about it. Personally, there’s no way I could sip a rum drink knowing about the devastation just down the coast — just as I couldn’t go enjoy being in New York for a long time after 9/11 or New Orleans while the worst of the post-Katrina nightmare was still going on. Being in close proximity to so much suffering precludes good times for most of us, even as the local NY and NOLA CVBs begged us to bring our tourist and meetings dollars to the area so business as somewhat usual can resume and people can have some sense of normalcy again (and a cash-flow source, of course). Haiti, of course, is not a major meetings or tourism destination in the same way New Orleans or New York are, but there are some parallels to be drawn.

Then there was this quote in a Miami Herald story a poster on the Miforum listserv pointed out:

Arthur Applbaum, a Harvard University professor of ethics and public policy, said that while it shows “moral sensitivity to be disturbed by the thought that one is vacationing on the beach when others are suffering nearby … it also shows insufficient moral reflection to think that proximity makes a moral difference.

“The people of Haiti are suffering whether you take your beach vacation in the Dominican Republic or in Hawaii,” he said, “and it is a failure of the moral imagination not to be equally troubled in Waikiki.”

I have a failure of moral imagination then, because to me, there is a difference — even if I can’t articulate what exactly it is. I still think RCCL is doing the best thing it can in a terrible situation: bringing continuity to the people who depend on its passengers for their livelihood, along with aide and funds. I just would not be able to stomach being one of the passengers, not now. If that makes me a hypocrite, so be it.

For a first-person account of what being a passenger on a recent stop in Labadee was like, check out this post: Cruise with a Purpose. Granted, coming from an executive with cruising company Seasite.com may give it a bit of a positive spin, but I have a feeling she speaks for how most of the passengers probably felt about the experience.

We all want people to be fully engaged in every moment of a live meeting or conference, but what can we reasonably expect of people going to a virtual event? That’s the question Steve Gogolak tackles in this post on A Wider Net. I was surprised to learn that, generally speaking, people hang out at a virtual event for two to three hours. He doesn’t say if they’re checking e-mail at the same time or are sticking just to the virtual event site, but either way, that’s a lot longer than I would have guessed.

More important, though, is the idea that virtual event organizers really stop to think about what they want people to get from the event, and how long they will need to linger there to get it. I believe a lot of us still, in our minds at least, equate online events with face-to-face meetings and set our expectations accordingly. But the level of engagement is different, the experience is different, and the interactions are different — and so should be our expectations.