This entire thing started off innocently enough. Connie and I wanted to go to a Technical Communications conference in Austin so I wrote the organizer and asked if he would like to trade some advertising and coverage for a couple spots at the event. This was the same thing we did for the STC conference in the spring.
And then the dam broke.
The organizer of the LavaCon Conference, Jack Molisani, quickly replied and said that he was very interested and wanted to know what we could do. Connie and I said that we could do a little coverage but since we were a small team so Jack suggested a contest for a couple additional bloggers.
Water starts rushing down the river picking up me and Connie.
We run the contest. In addition to those two spots, Jack is kind enough to also allow a couple of our regular writers to attend. So, at the end of the day we’re going to LavaCon with a team of five people (contest winners Lois Patterson & Roger Renteria & SWU’s Jacquie Samuels) and a pretty aggressive coverage plan. It’s been a pretty fast and furious few weeks as the contest moved to the planning and as of Saturday now moves to the delivery. We’ll do our first live blogging Monday morning and have around 11 interviews lined up.
As of now, TechWhirl’s design is setup for planned feature articles and the occasional podcast but next week we have to have two different content streams. The first is our normal feature content and the second is our LavaCon coverage since we’re uninterested in becoming the LavaCon all the time channel. The plan of live blogging and content curation (separating the wheat from the Twitter chaff) for activities at the event. I’ve been forced to dive into some new services out there that helps turn an unmanaged flow of data into something useful and interesting and it’s been very interesting.
Riding the rushing water hoping not to fall off.
This process has also helped us think through some additional areas of content including providing industry news into the mix. I have this feeling we’re nearing a strategic moment with the company when we really start seeing a lot of progress. Of course, that feeling may just be the loopy feeling that occurs when someone spends far too little time sleeping and far too much time planning and preparing.
