It’s been a while since I updated my blogroll, so I figured I’d spend my Friday off going through my various feeds and adding some of those new-to-me blogs I want to share. Here are some of the ones I’ve been adding, in no particular order:

The Forum Effect, by the Association Forum of Chicago. They have new bloggers coming on all the time, and topics range all over the association management field, but do include a fair amount of posts about meetings.

The Edge, by the Conference Publishers, is all about conference and content. It has several excellent contributors, but my favorite is Mitchell Beer, who also has started writing a few things for MeetingsNe t (including this great Eulogy for Concepts Worldwide and his commentary on the Social Security Administration’s secret videotaping of a meeting).

SocialFishing, by social media maven Maddie Grant, who formerly was on the blogroll as writer of the Diary of a Reluctant Blogger (my how times have changed!). Great social media content. Her partner Lindey Dreyer’s blog, Association Marketing Springboard, also is a recent-but-way-overdue add.

Illumination Galleries, a blog by Jay Smethurst about exploring the future of meetings and events, is the one that started me off on this today when Jay sent me a note and, after scoping out his blog, I wanted to add to the blogroll.

Midcourse Corrections by Jeff Hurt is one of my new favorites. He always has something thought-provoking to say (remember this post on MPI charging for online access to WEC? It sure got a lot of people talking, including me.)

Then there’s John Folks’ (un)Conventional blog, which so far hasn’t given me a lot of insight into PCMA or John’s perspectives on planning (he’s PCMA’s chairman), but I hold out hope that it’ll pick up. It has a great title, anyway. Wish I’d thought of it!

The Meeting Support Institute, by Maarten Vanneste, gives you the meeting architect view of the industry.

Meet Prepared, a blog about risk management and contingency planning, really should be on everyone’s must-read list. Excellent, excellent, excellent.

The CEIR blog is, well, the CEIR blog. I do like the videos they include pretty regularly.

Trade Show Help is more aimed at exhibitors than exhibition organizers, but it’s a great way to gain insights into what your clients are thinking about.

Ready 2 Spark by Lara McCulloch-Carter is full of great ideas and tips for special events. Plus it’s just great fun to read.

Event Manager Blog is another group-authored blog, full of great tips and info on, duh, managing events.

Association Meetings (have to love that name–oh wait, we liked it so much we used it for a magazine) is Julie Hewett’s thoughts on how associations can improve their meetings.

Professional Event Production, by Pat Ahaesy, is all about event and conference planning, production, and management.

Meetings Podcast offers a bunch of great podcasts on all things meetings-related. They’re great fun to listen to, and you might even learn something. I’m particularly partial to Mike McCallen’s posts and podcasts, but they’re all good.

And I can’t forget to mention that TSMI’s Trade Show Marketing Blog is back! Rich Westerfield had wandered away from us into the land of coffee entrepreneurship, but he’s back blogging about trade show marketing, and we’re all richer for it.

I remember reading on the listservs a while back about all the crazy demands some celebrities put in their contract riders (ah hem, Mary J. Blige, do you really need a new toilet seat installed just for your use?). Then today on BoingBoing I saw that there actually was a reason why Van Halen demanded a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed. Here’s the rationale, from Snopes.

The prize for the most interesting contract, though, must go to the Foo Fighters. Here’s a copy, courtesy of The Smoking Gun (warning: There’s some language that some could find offensive).

Doesn’t seem possible that ASAE and The Center’s annual meeting is coming up that fast! I’ve just started looking through the sessions, and it seems like there is more juicy meeting planning content than usual this year. If anyone reading this has any suggestions for can’t miss sessions, let me know.

Also, ASAE is making it easy to follow all the people posting about the show by collecting feeds to related posts in its Annual Hub. If I can ever figure out how to get a feed going for the new ASAE subcategory I just set up, you’ll see my posts aggregated there, too. (That’s a big if, though, the way things are going today!)

Check out this headline: A 91% Decline in Wynn Resorts Profits are no Cause for Concern: Still Produce a Profit and Company Shares Surge After Report. Hard to imagine this is even possible, but evidently, it is. Oh to have margins like that…

I’ve been noticing some interesting trends in how I connect with people lately. It seems like people don’t leave comments here on the blog very often anymore (not that they ever did all that much), but more are responding when the post goes up on my Facebook wall. And there’s this one guy I cannot for the life of me get ahold of via phone or e-mail, but if I DM (direct message) him on Twitter, he’s on it immediately.

Just goes to show where people are “living” these days, and how important it is to try to keep up with it all if I want to keep up with you all. I’m still not sure how this translates to marketing a meeting, but I’m guessing your attendees are no different than the various people I’m trying to reach. The hard part is to participate in all these different media without spamming folks with the same message in 20 different places (which I’m guilty of, sorry to say, with blog autofeeds).

Ideally, I’d want to craft specific messages for each media, but since I haven’t found a way to create a 30-hour day yet, it’s just not happening. How do you handle it?

Someone just asked me for a list of my favorite association bloggers. While I can list a bunch of blogs I love about managing associations and meeting planning, I really don’t follow many actual association blogs (other than the American Society of Business Publication Editors’, which is a pretty good one for its audience. Oh, and of course ASAE and The Center’s Acronym, which is terrific).

Who are your favorites? I’d like to be able to give her some good examples of blogs that really speak to their members’ needs. Thanks!