Mary Hodder @ Napsterization has posted a great idea: A wiki site for speakers. (What a wiki is.) From her post:

First, it is an open wiki for anyone to post themselves or another speaker. There is an alphabetical list of speakers, but that presumes you know who to look for or have the time to read through peoples information by name. However, with Categories, conference organizers can find people with expertise in art or law or who are researchers or CEOs (yes.. many executive conferences want CEOs or high level executives to talk). I encourage you all to add new categories (which are really tags) to allow people to be found this way.

I’ve seeded it with about 50 women, but I want men and women to be put themselves up. The goal is to show conference organizers that when they are looking to have a panel or talk on an area that there are many folks to choose from. I will be adding more men, but this effort comes from a need we discussed at Blogher, where organizers often say they can’t think of any women who are expert enough to talk, or they just chose those they could find in their usual circles.

I want to broaden the circles, get more voices out there and make more opportunities for all of us. The wiki is also an effort to make information explicit and easily edit-able by anyone, that in the past has often been locked up in Speaker Service Bureaus.

Speakers, be heard!

Many thanks to Gary for letting me know about this!

There’s a good article on building good e-mail lists in Chief Marketer called An Eight-Point Checklist for Building Your List. While some of the points are pretty basic (be sure to get permission before adding someone to the list, for example), but I hadn’t thought about the five levels of permission before. E-marketers, check it out.

There’s a cute article in the New York Times (free reg. req’d) about annoying people on planes, and what you can do about them: If Only the Flier in Front of You Were a Fan of Miss Manners
. I had no idea before reading this that some people actually watch porn DVDs in flight on their laptops—eew. Or that there was something called the Knee Defender that keeps the tray table from collapsing, so the seat in front of you can’t recline.

Anyway, it’s an interesting read.