E-venting.net

Out of Office Reply: The Industry is at a Conference Next Week

The industry events calendar is starting to look a lot like a snake pit, as I predicted. Here's what's up for Next Week alone:

Search Engine Strategies: April 25-26, Toronto
eMarketing 6 West: April 25-26, San Francisco
Digital Media Wire Games and Mobile Forum: April 25-26, NYC
Shop.org Online Marketing Workshop: April 26-28, Orlando
Ad-Tech SF: April 26-28, San Francisco
MediaPost Outfront Conference: April 27, New York

... plus about a dozen regional events on everything from marketing to the Upfront. I calculate (ok, conjure up) that about 75% of the industry will be within 50 miles of an interactive event at some point next week.

And I can't attend any of them because I'm producing a client summit (it's invite only, so please don't register expecting to hear Bob Garfield, Steve Rubel, Joseph Jaffe, Jeff Cole and others for free) for Sympatico/MSN in Toronto (which we had the good fortune/sense of not overlapping with SES).

As soon as I get back, it's back to work on this Industry Calendar Project - we sure need it. I don't think these shows are wilfully overlapping. But what I propose is an open wiki-calendar where everyone can at least indicate tentative dates for shows as soon as they start thinking of them. I know (believe me) that first choices are rarely captured, largely because of venue unavailability (particularly for larger shows, where the venue pickings are slimmest), but at least an open calendar would allow producers to see who is aiming for where and when, to avoid conflict and - in some cases - even prompt partnership or co-location conversations.

But it's not just conference producers I'm watching out for. Attendees, speakers and particularly sponsors should see where the conflicts are likely to happen, and make plans accordingly.

Please leave me any thoughts and feedback here or by email. I can't take this one on by myself.

The Standard Deviation of High-Res Headshots

How do you define the 'high-res' part of 'high-res headshot' when it's contained in the sentence, "Please send me a high-res headshot for use in the printed show book"?

I'm not being a jackass here - I really want to know. Leave me an email, a comment, whatever. Because I've obviously been using a definition that most people don't subscribe to. For my current show, I've been sent dozens of speaker headshots which I've requested to be 'high-res for use in the printed show book.' They've ranged in size from 4k to 17mb. I'm not kidding - about either.

Honestly, I expected most to come in between about 800K and 2MB, with a few in the 3MB - 4MB range. A few years ago, before the advent of digital cameras and when we were using professional photogs and scanning in photos, I'd expect photos to be 5MB and up, probably saved as .TIF files. But I'm figuring everyone has a digital camera and everyone transfers files and everyone (at least in this industry) has seen the difference between a picture that's reasonably clear on the screen and how grainy it looks if you print it. The photos I've received however have been all over the map. If I plotted them out and ran an analysis, I'd find a standard deviation of over 3MB. But if I put them on a curve ALMOST NONE would be in the range I expected. Instead of a bell curve, it would look like an 'M', or a Bactrian Camel.

So in the absence of a tool to automate and simplify this process, I should probably figure out how to be clearer the first time out, and not have to exchange a bunch of emails, and risk missing print deadlines due to fuzzy pictures.

So a little help please - what does 'high-res' mean to you? What should I be asking for?