Fellow frugal fliers may want to join me in bookmarking this post from Travelhacker: The Top 50 Resources for Getting a Cheap Flight. I hadn’t even heard of some of these before.

John Moore over at Brand Autopsy has been doing a “would you miss” series of posts that I’ve found to be fascinating, if a little scary. Like yesterday’s entry: Would you miss Pizza Hut if it went out of business tomorrow? He adds:

Does Pizza Hut provide such a unique product and customer experience that we would be saddened if it didn’t exist? Does Pizza Hut treat its employees so astonishingly well that those workers would not be able to find another employer to treat them as well? Does Pizza Hut forge such unfailing emotional connections with its customers that they would fail to find another pizza joint that could forge just as strong an emotional bond?

Now replace “Pizza Hut” with the name of your organization, or even just your meeting. Now do you see why it’s a little scary?

So far, the best April fools have been hanging out at Google, which today brings us things like gDay (”Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now”); and Project Virgle (”starting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars.”). The Virgle pioneer application alone is a hoot.

Any other good pranks out there?

Update: Wired has some good ones in its top 10 list. Like this one:

1995 The hotheaded naked ice borer, a sort of mole with a searing, bony forehead, lurks under Antarctica, melting the ice beneath the butts of hapless penguins and eating them as they sink. When Discover magazine publishes its retraction, penguins everywhere breathe a collective sigh of relief.

Which reminds me of this great one from the BBC: Flying penguins

OK, back to work!

If so, check out the (relatively) new job board over at Confabb. It looks like it has quite a few meeting planner jobs posted–one of which just may be the perfect match for you or someone you know.

There’s also a place for vendors to display their wares on the site, though it looks like you may have to pay to play on that one. If it builds out some, that could become another good resource for planners.

I’ve always liked the idea behind the site, and these look to be useful additions. Good job, guys.

No, you don’t have to know what a Squidoo is. All you have to know is that Marlys K. Arnold put together a great resource for her session, “Podcasts, Wikis & Blogs … Oh My!” recently at a KCMPI Professional Education Conference, then posted it on Squidoo so we all can use it.

Here’s the link–enjoy!

This is pretty off-topic, but interesting nonetheless. Have you seen this video yet? If not, take a few seconds to check it out–it’s fairly mind-blowing.

Want to know why we are so selective in our vision? Here’s the science behind what’s called change blindness.

Makes me wonder if there isn’t a mental version of change blindness as well, where we only grasp familiar concepts, or those we expect to see, or those we are looking for. How much gets caught in our mental filter and never makes it to our conscious minds?

Maybe this isn’t so off-topic after all: Not only could a demonstration along the lines of that ad serve as a great waker-upper for a keynote, but the concept is something planners, and presenters, should think about when designing a session or a meeting. As a cost-cutting measure, what will never register with your audience and so can be omitted painlessly from your budget? From an adult-learning perspective, how is this perceptual gap helping or hindering your efforts to educate your participants?

I’m just finding it really interesting to think about this morning.