Just found this on the Times list of 50 best Web sites: Tripkick.com which lets you choose hotel rooms by criteria much like SeatGuru helps you pick out the best seat on your plane. You can search for a quiet room, or one with a great view, or one on a specific floor. Anyway, I haven’t used it (and it doesn’t seem to have my hotel for ECEF in its database yet), but I’ll try it again for my next trip. I like the concept.

If you’ve toyed with the idea of holding an unconference but aren’t sure exactly how to go about it, check out how Ben planned a successful unconference in 10 steps.

This is one of the more useful posts I’ve run across lately: Which airlines are charging what fees.

Everything you need to know to get started with adding some social networking aspects to your conference can be found in this post by Chris Brogan.

Many thanks to Rich, who is at least temporarily back to blogging on TSMI’s Trade Show Marketing Report.

A while ago I mentioned that some organizations were asking attendees to bring their own conference bags as a way to cut down on waste at meetings. Well, Nancy over at Pretentious Musings of a Green Meeting Planner has uncovered another reason to ask people to BYOB: It can be a whole new way to network. Check out her post for details–I love this!

A bonus post from Nancy’s blog: Give Man a Fish and He Will Sell You a Chilean Sea Bass. This one left me speechless.

Well, I’m taking off for my summer sailing vacation in the British Virgin Islands. I’m trying to line up some posts for while I’m gone so this place won’t be totally dormant, but if anything exciting happens and I don’t say anything about it, at least you’ll know why.

See you all when I get back on the 14th!

If you have a drive-in meeting, you might want to send attendees this URL, courtesy of MSN. You just plug in your zip code and it tells you where to find the cheapest gas (and most expensive–no idea why you’d want to know that, but whatever).

This tip of the day comes via Access All Areas. Thanks!

Presentation Zen brings us two examples of just how bad PowerPoint can be (not that we need any more examples, but these are doozies): Obama, JFK vs. Bad PowerPoint. As Garr says:

If bad slides can take some of the impact off even this kind of speech, imagine what wordy slides could do to your ability to connect with an audience.