Personal thoughts on this year’s Blog World Expo

As I’ve mentioned before, I couldn’t make the August ‘blog conference in Las Vegas,’ namely Tim Bourquin’s New Media Expo, due to commitments for the Edinburgh Fringe, but the second year of Rick Calvert’s Blog World Expo was on my radar as a potential gig to go to. Thanks to some work comissioned to report on the conference, I was all set for a lightning trip to Las Vegas. Flying out on Friday morning from Edinburgh, returning from the Nevada city on the Monday afternoon left little time for the body clock to get remotely close to the right time-zone – this was certainly a spirit to and around a conference, compared to the more marathon style trips I’ve done in the past.

Landing at 8pm and checking into my hotel, I had just enough time to quickly freshen up, get into the kilt, and head up to the first (and ultimately the main) party of the Conference – the TechSet Party at the Mirage. Frankly this is how to do a good mixer event, so congrats to both
Stephanie Agresta and Brian Solis who put this together. It also showed me why Blog World Expo was a good choice of event to attend. TechSet and the event as a whole had a great mix of people that I already knew and could play catch-up with, but it had a large group of people that I didn’t know… or at least didn’t know at the start of the weekend. Which is as it should be.

By having that varied mix, a lot of issues got raised and challenged in the sessions, there was very little ‘coasting’ from any of the panels. People did get called on their views, and while in most cases they could justify them, the fact that they were challenged is great. There is no one right way of doing anything online.

The evening of Day One saw the strangely titled ‘opening night party’ after most people had been around Blog World Expo and the Fringe events for two days. Finishing relatively early at 8pm, that left most people with a blank schedule in the evening and a gap opening up for someone to make as big a splash as TechSet had done the night before. The only discussed party was by Zappos, being held in The Living Room at Planet Hollywood, but unfortunately it just wasn’t the sort of atmosphere that helped mingling and discussion.

The Living Room turned out to be a curtained off area at the top of a balcony which had a bar squeezed in, and a very loud PA system. Everyone squeezed in, overpriced drinks, and just a complete inability to enoy it. I think I left all that behind in my first year at University. Next year, someone should have a late evening mixer event and be able to gather a lot of goodwill.

Sunday was a day where the question was “when are you leaving?” With most of the attendees based in the US, they were all talking afternoon and evening flights to get home for work on Monday morning. It lead to a feeling that the conference was fizzling out at the end, rather than having a definitive end, although Rick did say that the last burst of the tradeshow at 3pm was one of the busiest of the event. Perhaps having a definitive ‘end’ to the program at 1pm might have cured this feeling. It wasn’t a wrong feeling, and it’s not a negative criticism, it’s just that it felt a little bit weird.

A word about the hotel… I was in the Excalibur, on the southern tip of The Strip, and a very strange mix of a hotel it is. With typical American subtlety, it’s a Medieval / Arthurian theme, with a rather fairytale castle built between the four strong walls of the forty story hotel room blocks. It looks great in pictures, but the rooms are still your rather simple big beds with a bit of space around them, and a reasonable sized bathroom – plus a 45” TV which came in useful for some Sunday night American Football (always nice to catch that in person, rather than some dodgy P2P stream).

I was also buddying up with a room-mate for the weekend, so thanks have to go out to Nicholas Chase for putting up with my snoring and generally never once giving me the feeling that I was getting in the way of all his A/V equipment in the room.

For such as short visit, Blog World Expo was definitely worth confusing my body clock for, even though by the time my first batch of jetlag was hitting me I was already on the flight home. The venue (Las Vegas Convention Center) and seminar rooms were the perfect fit for the numbers of attendees, the opportunites to connect and reconnect were plentiful, there was time between sessions to mingle and socialise, there was a wide range of skill and expertise over a number of genres… everything about the event had been mixed together with good effect.

Yes there were a few quirks, but on the whole I’m glad Rick invited me along and that I attended. I can’t compare it to the NME, as I wasn’t at that event and would be relying on other’s view. What I do know is that from a personal point of view, Blog World Expo was worth every minute of my time… and yes, I’m looking forward to heading back next year, but perhpas with more than 6 days notice.