At least in the U.K., it sounds like men could save their organizations some money by emulating their female colleagues in their meeting-going habits, according to a Net4Now article on research from BT Conferencing. Men travel further (64 percent go abroad, compared to 29 percent of women who go outside the U.K.), and 84 percent of the guys stayed in hotels at least once, while only 57 percent of the women do. Well, I guess that goes along with the travel abroad thing—if the women are mostly staying close to home, they’re probably just day meetings that don’t require a hotel stay, right?

Oh but wait, the women also are smaller spenders because they use audio and web conferencing more, and so incur fewer travel expenses. Ah ha, and the company that did the survey is a meeting tech company, so of course, spending less is good when it’s related to using the technology instead of face-to-face meetings that require travel. And alternate forms of conferencing are great for a lot of situations. But if I were getting all the webinars while my male colleagues were going to meetings in Paris, hmm.

I love this Photoshop contest being held now by Worth1000: Photoshopping monsters into classical paintings.

I thought these gremlins were kinda cute, but some were eerily spooky, freaky, and altogether Halloweeny. Check out the pinhead Mona Lisa, or the American Gothic Hannibal Lecter style, or Norman Rockwell with an alien look to his face. Creepy–enjoy!

It sounds like Miami is moving on, post-Wilma. Even though the power is still out in some areas, the airport is open, the mandatory curfew is lifted, and the New Cardiovascular Horizons Conference, which had be relocated to Miami from New Orleans after Katrina, began as scheduled on Thursday.

The CVB also reports that almost “95 percent of hotels and restaurants on Miami Beach and downtown Miami are open for business and receiving guests. The majority of hotels in other areas of Miami-Dade County are open; of those which are closed, most are due to remaining power outages. Most shopping malls are open for business. The majority of attractions are prepared to open when power is fully restored. There is minimal, if any, beach erosion in the Greater Miami area as a result of the storm.”

And that, my friends, is all good news.

Courtesy of hotel-online: Miami Hotels Take Steps Toward Recovery; Locals, Utility Crews, Cleanup Crews Taking Thousands of Rooms.

Sorry for the quietude lately—I was at the American Medical Association’s Task Force on Continuing Medical Education/Industry Collaboration in Baltimore all week, then today was out trying to learn how to use our new publishing software. Lots to say, just no time to say it. I’ll try to catch up with you all soon.

In the meantime, one thing I love about air travel is the waiting. No, seriously. I was just hanging out at the Baltimore airport waiting for my delayed flight to arrive and this kid came over and started chatting. A really cool kid, probably around 21 years old. We covered philosophy, religion, the pharmaceutical industry, world travel, and why girls always break guys’ hearts in the half hour before he had to catch his flight. Then I got to finish my book, and eat a cookie with M&Ms that I never would have bought in real life. In that ‘tweener airport time, I’ve noticed the conversations are better (maybe because you know they won’t have to stretch to fill an entire flight) and calories don’t count.

Scott, if you ever read this, safe travels, and I hope to bump into you again one of these days!

The Public Relations Society of America had to pull its show out of the Fontainebleau, and Fort Lauderdale Boat Show is rescheduled, and that’s just the beginning of the meetings-relate damage hurricane Wilma is causing before she even reaches Florida, according to The Miami Herald:

The Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau said four small meetings worth about $500,000 in spending canceled because of Wilma and another two postponed. The tourism bureau itself also moved its annual meeting from Tuesday to Nov. 7.

You, like me, may be able to tolerate people who cut in front of us in line at the grocery store. We can toss junk mail without too much angst, and ignore loud cellphone yakkers (OK, I fail on the last one), but if you know of someone who lets life’s little annoyances drive them bonkers, there’s a new book just for them. It’s called, not surprisingly, Life’s Little Annoyances, and is written by New York Times writer Ian Urbina. From a BoingBoing post:

It is a compendium of human inventiveness, by turns juvenile and petty, but in other ways inspired and deeply satisfying. We meet the junk-mail recipient who sends back unwanted “business reply” envelopes weighted down with sheet metal, so the mailers will have to pay the postage. We commiserate with the woman who was fed up with the colleague who kept helping himself to her lunch cookies, so she replaced them with dog biscuits that looked like biscotti. And we revel in the seemingly endless number of tactics people use to vent their anger at telemarketers, loud cellphone talkers, spammers, and others who impose themselves on us.

Ah, passive-aggression at its finest. I just ordered two for a couple of people I know who get mad as $% and can’t take it anymore all too often. I know, it has nothing to do with meeting planning, but it seems to me that planners have to take more of these little annoyances than those in other professions. (For an idea of what the book is about, check out Mr. Urbina’s blog, where you can submit your own ingenious solutions.)

OK, this is just weird, but check out these secret wall tattoos behind hotel art. No, I have no idea what this is all about, but I saw it on Certified Association Executive blog, and found it strangely compelling…

The beautiful suburban New York Garden City Hotel, where we’ve held our sales meetings the past couple of years, got a surprise when “a former employee ran into a ballroom lobby wearing a gas mask, spilled a suspicious yellow liquid on the floor and subsequently fled.” Though it turned out to be a safe “protein-based food product,” 150 people still had to be quarantined. Great, another disgruntled employee on the loose, though I’m guessing he’s an ex-employee about now.

But what I really want to know is: What the heck kind of a “protein-based food product” smells like vomit and/or ammonia? On second thought, maybe I don’t want to know.

Is your organization one of the many now considering adding a blog to improve communications with members or to enhance a convention? If so, I say great, go for it—but don’t count on your blog making much money through advertising or sponsorship. As Business Week’s Stephen Baker says in this post about a trade magazine that will only launch a blog if it rakes in some bucks, you never know unless you try, but the real benefits are likely not going to be measurable in dollars and cents. (Note the dearth of ads on face2face, alas. And yet I blog on.)

Unless you think you can garner the traffic that Business Week’s Blogspotting and other high-profile blogs do, chances are, you won’t get a whole lot of advertising revenue from it, because most advertisers still are looking at blogs like they’re any other kind of Web site, where value derives pretty much solely from click-throughs and numbers of eyeballs.

But blogs are different. I’d approach it more like a sponsorship to a specialty conference, where the value derives more from getting in front of the right people than just getting in front of a lot of people. I seriously doubt anyone who doesn’t care about meetings reads face2face. You guys may be a relatively small group in the general scheme of things, but you care, deeply, about what you do. That should be worth something to someone. If you blog about fly fishing, or widget manufacturing—whatever your specific focus is, there’s likely a group of folks who will stop by to hear what you have to say (assuming you say something useful and meaningful). They’re the same ones who come to your conferences, read your magazines, join your committees, and buy your sponsors’ and exhibitors’ stuff.

Then again, I’m of mixed minds when it comes to monetizing blogs—I almost feel like it adds a layer between you and me in some way. Then again (again), it would help justify (in a corporate way) all the time I spend doing this. I don’t know. If this thing never makes a dime, I’m still perfectly happy doing it, because there’s so much I want to say to you guys (and so much I’d like to hear back from you about!). There aren’t enough pages in a magazine to say it, nor is there the freedom to editorialize all I want, which obviously is something I like to do. A lot. I can only hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

OK, I better stop yapping and get back to work (yes, I am procrastinating). But if you do want to sponsor this blog, let Melissa Fromento, our publisher, know. If you just want to talk blogging, I’m here.