Someone e-mailed me this morning and said: “I liked your website better before when it was stand-alone. I just don’t like it under the heading of MeetingsNet. It gives me the feeling that you are less than independent. Perhaps, you are less than independent and I just didn’t realize it before.” Thank you, kind reader, for bringing this up. I’ve been meaning to talk about this for a while.

OK, I liked it better when face2face was on Typepad. A lot better. Aesthetically, it was a lot more reflective of what this blog is than it is wrapped in our corporate header (I lost on that one, but at least I won on not putting the red bar down the side that we have on the rest of our site!). We’ll be redesigning our Web site in the next couple of months, and I sincerely hope face2face soon will once again look and feel more like what it really is: My personal and independent take on what’s going on in this industry.

I started face2face pretty much independently of our company (I did get the OK from corporate, since I planned to identify myself as someone who works on the Meetings Group magazines and Web sites, not just some yahoo spouting off about meetings). But as the disclaimer buried way down on the right side says, everything I write on face2face is my own opinion. No one copyedits it (although our copyeditor is a regular reader and does point out my many typos—I gave up on writing in Word and spellchecking ages ago and just post directly these days.) No one reads anything I write before it’s posted to the world, and no one has asked me to take down anything I write here.

I use common sense when deciding what to write about, and of course take heed of all slander, libel, etc., laws. Otherwise, it’s whatever I think you all might be interested in hearing about, or whatever I think is interesting, which I hope you do, too.

The reality is that this blog is my labor of love for this industry (no, blogging isn’t in my job description, and I don’t get paid for doing it. Yes, I am certifiably insane). I like that we can let people know about it with links from our e-newsletters and home pages—otherwise, it would probably have a readership of my dad and me—but the thoughts, opinions, words, etc., are my own. Always have been, always will be. I’m grateful to have bosses who trust me enough to let me run free here, but run free I do. Barefoot and tossing daisies over my shoulders with a wild gleam in my eye, no less.

The day someone tries to tell me what I can and can’t say here is the day this blog ceases to exist. Of course, then I’d have to start one up anonymously elsewhere, because I’m too hopelessly addicted to this thing to stop now!

This must be geek day, but being sort of geeky, I can’t resist mentioning that ASAE has created a group on the photo sharing site Flickr so attendees can upload the photos they take at the meeting.

You XtremeASAE bloggers are just determined to demonstrate all the cool stuff, aren’t you? Even if you’re not going to Nashville (sadly, very sadly, I’m not), keep an eye on what ASAE is doing this year—they seem determined to incorporate a bunch of the technologies that pretty much any meeting could benefit from. I have to keep checking in just to see what they’ll come up with next. And if they get as innovative with their education as they are with their pre-show techability (I know, not a word), this could be their best conference yet.

Chris Hosford and I have been having an interesting e-mail exchange about his post wondering whether RSS (really simple syndication) might not be the next best thing in meeting marketing. I think it has the potential to be, but we’re nowhere near ready for an RSS revolution. How do I know? I can hear you all yawning and practically see your eyes glazing over. What the heck is she talking about? (Wikipedia RSS entry here—it’s a good explanation of what RSS is and how it works. Kevin Holland also has a succinct explanation on the XtremeASAE Blog).

And I can talk all day long about how I can’t imagine life without my news reader and its constantly updated feeds to the 100 or so blogs and other sites I monitor daily (or try to, anyway). All you need is an RSS feed on your conference site, and potential attendees who have news readers (I highly recommend Bloglines, which is where I keep most of my feeds). If you have those two elements, then you have the ability to update your attendees in real time on what’s going on with your event.

But chances are, you don’t have either, at least, not yet. People are just starting to understand the value of blogging their meetings–and since most blog providers include an RSS feed in the package, I’m hoping that RSS may one day soon leach into the mainstream.

Then again, it’s going on three years now I’ve been hammering our tech guys to set up an RSS feed for our Web sites and it hasn’t happened yet—though they promise it’s coming soon. I can only imagine how long it would take to get through an association’s committee for approval, much less implementation, much less adoption by potential attendees. My guess is that by the time that happens, the RSS train will have left the station and we’ll have something even cooler that’ll take another huge amount of time to go mainstream.

*sigh*