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Archive for August, 2011

Sonic Foundry Offers Strategic Planning Tools for Hybrid Events

August 31st, 2011 No comments

Sonic Foundry has long been a webcasting and teleconferencing thought leader, with an institutional understanding of the benefits of hybrid and blended events. For event planners it’s well worth your time to take a trip around their web site, which includes a number of uselful webcasts, whitepapers and case studies. A couple of great webcasts are available for free in their library: Try Strategic Planning for a Successful Hybrid Event which is presented by Victoria Fanning who is the Director of Hybrid and Online Meetings at EDUCAUSE. They’ve got a great slate of hybrid events–way ahead of the curve. If you’re interested in a user-driven webinar model (either as a participant or as a producer) try Hybrid Events: Choose Your Own Adventure. This is a deep dive, with 18 separate potential paths to follow. I see a lot of poorly produced webcasts out there–poorly lighted, bad sound, etc. To you people I recommend Lights, Camera, Action: Fool Proof Tips to Produce the Most Polished Webcasts on the Planet. This webcast includes Q&A with the respected Jan Ozer, contributing editor for Streaming Media and EventDV and blogger for AV Technology.

Chris Anderson, TED Curator, Entrepreneur, Idea Spreader, Etc.

August 19th, 2011 No comments

Few conference programmers can legitimately call themselves “curators.” Chris Anderson can. With a strong background in journalism, publishing and business, Anderson grew Future Publishing in the UK, sold it and moved on to the California tech boom in the 90′s, founding Imagine Media. I remember watching the Imagine empire grow in California during the dot-com boom. They always had great billboards along Highway 101 south of San Francisco. Imagine created Business 2.0 magazine, a seminal journal of the internet explosion, also the popular games website IGN, and over 100 other publications. In 1996, his success allowed him to create the private nonprofit Sapling Foundation, with the goal of tackling tough global issues by leveraging media, technology, entrepreneurship, and ideas. In 2001 got the conference bug, acquired TED and the rest is history. TED is what every business events should be: focused, passionate, and uncompromising about quality content. Plus, it’s mostly free to anyone with a browser. TED’s presenter guidelines, known as the TED commandments, will be useful to anyone recruiting speakers, especially if you’ve got talkers who are burned out or new to the game. There are a lot of ways to follow Chris: On twitter @tedchris, on the TED website, here’s a great interview with Chris on TED.com, here’s his Wikipedia page