Jeffrey Brown at the Tradeshow Blues Blog has a somewhat shocking post about those who simply must bare it all at a tradeshow. Literally. He tells tales of booth nookie, new interpretations of “experiential” learning sans clothes, and flashers in the aisles.

I must be going to the wrong shows—haven’t seen a nekkid person yet, much less lust in the booth or flashers on the floor. Though I did hear about a guy who got ejected from a show for riding up and down the escalators and pretending to tie his shoe repeatedly so he could try to get a peek up ascending women’s dresses. That was about the time I started wearing pants to conventions…

Am I just sheltered, or does this really go on? Enquiring minds want to know…

Sorry, I just have to rant a little about something that makes me crazy: Association-speak. You know, strategic plans and paradigm-shifting and all that yadda yadda. So I loved this post from Kevin Holland on the The Association Blog about how just this type of pablum-no-offense-intended association-speak is coming back to haunt Supreme Court Justice nominee Harriet Miers.

I left a long comment there, but the gist of it was that for some reason, association leaders all too often seem to think they need to protect members against anything controversial, divisive, or even just interesting, and so they water down communications to the point where they sound similar to Miers’ statement when she was president of the Texas Bar Association: “More and more, the intractable problems in our society have one answer: broad-based intolerance of unacceptable conditions and a commitment by many to fix problems.” (Nothing against Miers, just association-speak striking again.)

As I commented on Kevin’s blog, a leader should worry about leading, not saying something that might raise an eyebrow or two. And as Miers is finding out, what seems safe in the cocoon of an association is exposed for the inanity it really is when its brought out into the real world. And guess what? The real world is where your members live. They’re big boys and girls, they can take real challenges in real words. I’d love to see association leaders treat their members like the grown-up professionals they are, rather than feed them pablum. Yes, you could lose members, but you’d also gain members, and have a much more interesting, involved, and engaged constituency. Not to mention, meetings.

I know it’s a long and hallowed tradition to say nothing while appearing to say something, but please, I beg of you, cut it out and just talk with us human to human, instead of association to member. It could rock all of our worlds.

That’s a question I couldn’t help but ask as I read this post from Six Apart’s Anil Dash. He’s writing about the Web 2.0 conference held recently in San Francisco, but it could easily apply to so many other meetings:

So, there’s the Old Boy’s Club. And surprisingly, there’s a 50-50 ratio of wanna-bes to real successes within that club. But the unsurprising part is probably what the makeup of that club looks like. Web 2.0 might be made of people, as Ross Mayfield said, but judging by the conference, Web 2.0 is pretty much made of white people. I’m not used to any event in a cosmopolitan area being such a monoculture.

Now, the folks who organized Web 2.0 are good people whom I genuinely believe want their event to be inclusive. But the homogeneity of the audience doesn’t just extend to ethnicity, it’s even more evident in the gender breakdown. There are others who’ve covered this topic better than me, but it’s jarring to me not merely because the mix was such a poor representation of the web that I know, but because I think it’s going to come back and bite the web in the [#^%] if it doesn’t change eventually.

See, it’s not just making sure the audience and speakers represent the web we’re trying to reach, but the fact that Bay Area tech conferences are so culturally homogenous is dangerous for the web industry.

While it’s great to have the folks who come back year after year, meeting after meeting, Anil’s point is one well-taken. If you’re just preaching to the choir, how will you ever reach all the other voices in the congregation? More importantly, how will they reach you? If your meeting is similarly culturally homogenous, it’s past time to find ways to expand it from an exclusive club to an inclusive meeting representative of all the minds involved in your topic, not just a few. How to do that, I don’t know. But it’s too important not to try, whether your business is the future of the Internet or hog farming.

The Windsor Court Hotel in New Orleans is reopening for business on November 1, having sustained little damage from hurricane Katrina, according to a letter sent to ICPA members. These primarily being insurance and financial services meeting professionals, the letter asks them “to consider booking us for any of your catastrophe team personnel who have accommodations needs over the next several months, for your individual executive travel or for any potential meetings and or incentive programs.”

It sounds like, at least in Canada, they do. According to the Ottawa Business Journal:

Many organizations are looking more seriously at this technology as an alternative to in-person meetings and events, says Corey Galbraith, manager of webcast services for Galbraith Communications. As one of only a handful of companies in Canada that specializes in live broadcasting over the Internet, he says business has really started to boom.

“Particularly in the past three to four months, really ever since the gas prices have gone up, inquiries have tripled from all over the country, ” he says. “One call was from a training company who is interested because they travel all over Ontario doing seminars and they’re finding people just aren’t attending because it’s too expensive.”

Of course, it’s in his best interest to tout the wonders of Web conferencing (and this article is pretty much an ad for how great it is), but I can see this happening in both the U.S. and Canada, and anywhere else that’s feeling the gas crunch. Still, I’d rather meet face to face if at all possible. Even in our planning meetings for the 2nd Annual Pharmaceutical Meeting Planner Forum we’ll be holding next March, it’s amazing how much more we get done when we all sit down together, instead of teleconferencing. I think the Web is great for some types of meetings, but for others, well, we’ll hold our noses and pay at the pumps to get there.