Here are this year’s Trade Show Week Fastest 50 (fastest growing trade shows). Congratulations on keeping growth up in a down economy.

According to this article, convention planning is a great career choice because you get to enjoy nice long vacations when you go on site for a program. Say what?? The article describes it thusly:

If you can’t take time for a vacation, why not pursue a career where your job is actually an extended tour in paradise? Hotel managers and convention planners help corporate clients book long business meetings at luxurious accommodations in resorts and spas. Your work will seem like a juggling act, but you’ll be ideally situated to get the most of your off hours and long weekends. When the dust settles from a major booking, you can use compensation time for swimming and tanning.

Someone take that writer and have her shadow a meeting planner on site at a conference, please! This is just a tad misleading, don’t you think? Or maybe the writer just read this definition of symposium and thought that nothing much had changed since the ancient Greeks got the whole thing rolling (thanks to Ken for the pointer to that Wikipedia entry!).

Here’s more on the topic, from Meeting News.

How could anyone not click on these headlines?

U.S. Peppers Cleared but be Leery of Lobster Liver

Foil Balloons Under Attack (which was followed by California Balloon Ban Deflates)

Someone’s having fun over at our sister magazine, Special Events, and it shows. Made me smile, anyway (and click over to the stories).

How compelling are your calls to action? “Click here to register” may do the job, but it’s not much fun.

I had thought that perhaps towel origami was losing its grip on cruise ships and hotels around the world, but it looks like it’s still going strong. Behold the latest concoctions (via BoingBoing):

Awww.

Michael Hart posts some interesting audience response system results from the opening session at TS2 earlier this week. He says:

Some 34 percent of the audience said they had already seen the rising cost of airline tickets and the elimination of flights have an impact on their exhibiting programs. Another 43 percent said they were still OK, but were watching the situation closely. Only 12 percent said they weren’t worried.

He also relates that almost 60 percent of the anxious TS2 exhibitors said they were planning to scale back on trade shows if travel costs continue to rise, and 11 percent would quit exhibiting. Sobering numbers, to be sure, but I agree with Michael that it’s not doing anyone a favor to try to sweep this kind of information under the rug, to put our fingers in our ears and yell, “la la la, I can’t hear you.” It may not be pretty, but it is what it is, and smart trade show folks are preparing now for potentially tougher times to come (while of course still hoping for the best, or at least better).

Just ran across this on Mental Floss and thought it was interesting: How old is your brain? The screen flashes some numbers, then blank circles in the same position the numbers were in, and you have to click on the circles that correlate to the numbers, from lowest to highest.

On my first shot, my brain registered as 28 years old. Not bad, since I’m five years older than that (oh okay, more than five, but who’s counting?).

A couple of items in this morning’s Boston Globe caught my eye: First is this article about what happens to the loose change that people don’t remember to pick up on the other side of security. It goes to pay for screeners and equipment. From the article:

The TSA has been allowed to pocket the change since 2004 when it lobbied Congress to change the law so the money could be used within the organization instead of going to a general fund in the federal treasury. Since then, the nickels and dimes have been adding up: Between Sept. 30, 2004, and Oct. 1, 2007, the TSA accumulated more than $1 million from 450 US commercial airports - a tiny fraction of its $18 billion budget.

And then there’s this one about how Dinner in the Sky, a Belgium-based company that offers the view without the room by hauling diners, table, food, and servers 180 feet in the air by crane, is coming to the U.S. Frankly, just thinking about it makes my stomach flip-flop, but I guess it might be the ultimate experience for a group with no fear-of-heights-challenged members.

And speaking of making my stomach uneasy, someone who shall remain nameless sent me a link to this video for Extended Stay Hotels. It’s a little sleezy, very uncomfortable, and made me want to whoops my coffee. So of course, I have to share it with you, with a warning that you really probably don’t want to watch it.

And via a Twitter tweet from Guy Kawasaki, I learned about a travel-booking site I hadn’t heard of before: ESkyGuide.com. I haven’t had time to play with it yet, but I plan to check it out.

It’s interesting to peruse through the responses to Fast Company’s Big Idea: “Within five years, technology will obliterate the need for business travel.”

As I expected, there are 22 commenters who agree, and 92 who don’t. Make that 93 as I cast my vote (or try to. The darn system keeps booting me out for some reason). But as the technology gets better and travel gets worse (both financially and experientially), I think it will make a dent in nonessential business travel. So as long as your meetings are really, really good, they’ll still come. But they better be really, really good.

I guess I’m lucky never to have attended a session like the one Allen Stern talks about, where the presenters were so busy with the backchannels (live webcasting the session, that sort of thing) that those who were attending live felt short-changed. Allen writes:

When I spend thousands of dollars and my time to attend a conference, I am really not interested in watching the Qik CEO broadcast the session live to everyone without paying attention to what’s going on in the moment. I also really don’t give a rats ass what people outside the conference think of what’s going on inside the room. I want to have the speaker’s full attention. I didn’t have that today - not by a longshot. And again, I am using this session as an example but the issue is much more widespread.

I’m all for recording sessions and making them available to others, but the presenters shouldn’t be the ones doing the recording (I understand that this session was about the technology and so it wasn’t out of the blue, but still…). Or monitoring the Twitterings, or otherwise putting their attention on something other than interacting with the people who paid to be there. I don’t even like to live-blog sessions as an audience member because that splits my attention from what’s going on in the room to what I’m typing.

Loved this comment to Allen’s post: “Honestly, if you can’t pay attention to your own panel, how interested is anyone else going to be? This goes for people who go to a panel as an attendee then IM/Twitter the whole time. Unless you’re liveblogging Steve Jobs, then put it down and participate.” My sentiments exactly.

BUT…

Then I read this post by Jeffrey Veen, where he talks about how at a session he was presenting, there was this whole other conversation going on about the session via Twitter that he found out by accident when he went to turn off his phone. He says:

So I set the phone down on the table in front of me and kept an eye on it. I’m so glad I did.

As the conversation on stage continued, the stream of questions and comments from the audience intensified. I changed my tactics based on what I saw. I asked questions the audience was asking, and I immediately felt the tenor of the room shift towards my favor. It felt a bit like cheating on an exam.

So he got thinking about how to deal with this for the Start Conference, and this is what they’re going to try:

As we were planning Start, he said, “We should have someone onstage the whole time to represent the audience. Like an ombudsman does for a newspaper.”

So we decided to put a desk on stage and have our friend George Oates fill that roll. She’ll be on Twitter, IM, and email listening to what people are talking about. (We’ll also have volunteers collecting index cards for those not wanting to be online during the sessions.) And she’ll synthesize questions, interrupt us if we get boring, and call bull[**] if something sounds like it.

Yes!

Update: Now Kevin is wondering “when did become presenter versus attendee?“

Looks like a coalition of Christian groups are putting the pressure on Marriott International to keep its hotel TVs porn-free (article here). Since the chain doesn’t actually own or operate most of the hotels that fall under its brands, the company’s not really able to do a heck of a lot about it, I would think. From the article:

So far, Marriott has agreed only to talk with LodgeNet and hotel owners about one issue: adding safeguards to keep children from seeing sex movies. Now, parents can block adult programs with the remote control or call the front desk to do it.

One option promoted by the coalition: make guests ask for access to porn movies instead of requiring them to opt out.

A coalition leader, the Rev. Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association, said his group will consider taking action if Marriott doesn’t agree to curtail pay-per-view porn by Aug. 15.

I’m wondering, why Marriott? I would assume most hotels had pay-per-view porn, though it’s not something I’ve ever really thought about and definitely not something I’ve researched. But the article does cite some that don’t, including the Omni chain, which is says cut out the hardcore back in 1999. Anyway, I thought this was interesting. I wonder if there are conservative groups for which in-room porn accessibility is a meeting deal-breaker?

Thanks to Dan at the MeCo listserv for the pointer!