Grand Strand Bloggers

It’s that time of year, when we being the sprint to plan the next CREATE South conference. We will be having a conference call today, Friday 1/23 at noon to discuss things. From here forward the calls will be at noon Wednesdays, with the same call information. Dial 1-712-432-3000 and enter bridge #901881 .

We’re getting a little bit of a late jump on it this year, but I think we can have all the big decisions made fairly quickly. We’d love to get more people involved in the planning and organization this year. It was a great fun and useful time last year, and I’m sure we can do even better next time. Come participate, y’all!

The CREATE South blog has a big linky roundup of the day. Thanks to everyone for coming out and making it a very special event!

We are entering the final stretch before the CREATE South conference on April 19th. If you know of people who live in the area who might be interested, please let them know about it. Do you have friends, neighbors, relatives that you think might be interested in learning about blogging, podcast and the online world? Send them a link to our site! Do you know smart teenagers who might be interested, or retirees who are getting in to the digital world and want to know more? Send them our way! This is our mission, to get people interested and knowledgeable about this stuff. Please take a few moments and send an email to people you know to inform them of this conference. We deeply appreciate it.

Also, if you are planning on coming and haven’t registered, please come to the site and sign up. We’re using this headcount to know how many people to feed, so it really is important. It wouldn’t be the Carolina way to let people go hungry at a party now, would it?

Tomorrow at noon and every Thursday noon until April 19th, there will be a conference call about the CreateSouth conference planning. If you want to be involved, please call in. We’re at that point where we need ever more people involved to get the word out and to help with the planning. Come and join in the fun!

In order to join the meeting, use the following information:

Conference Number 1-712-432-3000
Conference Bridge Number: 901881

Tomorrow (Friday the 8th) at noon I’ll be having another conference call about well, our conference. After this week, they will regularly be on Thursdays at noon. This will be both our mechanism to keep each other informed about what is going on as well as kind of a forcing function to put lots of internal deadlines for tasks to keep the urgency going.

In order to join the meeting, use the following information:

Conference Number 1-712-432-3000
Conference Bridge Number: 901881

Thanks!

Here’s a very quick summary of the results of our meeting Thursday.

• We have picked a date, Saturday April 19th 2008
• Our first choice of venue is the Myrtle Beach Train Depot, and our backup is the HGTC Conference Center on the old AF base. We will try to book the venue next week.
• We’ve got domains and webhosting basically set up. Dave will set up a blog specifically for the conference this weekend and link to it from here when it is ready. The full website will come behind shortly.
• If you want to help with the conference, ie be assigned tasks, let Dave know and he will send you an invite from the Basecamp project we are using to stay organized.

This is all very exciting. Within a few days things will really get rolling, so keep watching this space.

I apologize for the last minute nature of this announcement. Everyone is trying to catch up post-holidays and is busy to the gills. We have a few decisions to make regarding our Myrtle Beach conference. We need to pick a date and a venue, since those choices block everything else. We can’t really publicize or plan anything until then.

We are having a meeting tomorrow over lunchtime, and it will primarily be over the phone. It will start at 12:30 PM and should last no more than half an hour. The phone number is 712-432-3000 and the Conference Bridge Number is 901881 . The agenda is to decide on the date of the conference. We’ve identified April as a good month but haven’t locked in the weekend. Related to that, we need to make a venue choice. We have several options that are cheap or free and can hold up to the low hundreds of attendees. If you have input on these, you can either call in to the meeting or drop an e-mail to GrandStrandBloggers@gmail.com by noon tomorrow. Check the calendars of your area and advocate your position, and all input will be taken into consideration. After this, we can move forward to publicize and plan this conference and make something wonderful from .t

Thanks to everyone that submitted ideas for the name. It shows our little community growing and growing.

We started with over 20+ names submitted for consideration. We then took the list and looked for possible domain names for each one. We immediately eliminated ones that did not have a .com associated with it. We also made sure a .org was associated with each one. From there we eliminated anything that had it pin pointed to an exact location (myrtle beach). From a pure marketing point of view we want to make sure we are portable if need be. Looking at other marketing aspects and the over all focus of the conference (not just a blog conference) a few more were eliminated.

This has left us with 4 names. (One is a late entry By Dave himself!) Now it is up to all of us to pick the top one.

Name Our Conference

Please remember that the results of the poll are not final.

A group of us Grand Strand bloggers got together tonight to discuss whether or not to pursue a new media conference in Myrtle Beach this spring. We kicked around the pros and cons, best and worst cases and decided we can live with them all. In other words, it is on! We’re looking at April 2008 with an exact date to be pinned down shortly and tentative space to be secured. We’re not sure what to expect on turnout and are building in mechanisms to allow us to scale up if we exceed our attendance predictions, etc etc. All details will start to take shape soon. Further updates will be posted to this blog so subscribing will be the best way to find out what is happening.

The first order of business is to pick a name for this conference so that we can register a domain and go forward. We are accepting nominations until midnight EST on Wednesday December 6th. After that, we’ll put up a poll for voting until the following Sunday. Whatever wins we will roll forward with. Please leave your nominations in comments, second other suggestions and make your opinions known. For those of you with your own blogs, please publicize our current nomination process and that fact we are going for it. Everyone is welcome, but we are particularly focusing on the magic circle of about 3ish hours driving distance, which includes roughly south to Savannah, west to Augusta and north to Raleigh or so.

Thanks to everyone whose enthusiasm and interest made us decide to go forward. We’ll do our best to have a shindig everyone learns from and everyone is proud of.

If you are interested in tossing around a few ideas as far as getting a conference together please stop by Liberty Beer Garden at Broadway between 5:30-6. Hope to see you there.