I'm feeling a little lazy this weekend. You know the feeling I mean: that late Friday afternoon lethargy. The week between Christmas and New Years. That curious floating sensation that creeps up on you and steals your attention like the slyest of pickpockets!
No doubt it's the looming holidays. I've been hunting down Thanksgiving recipes (one of two or three days in the year when I actually do some cooking), thinking about Big-Screen TVs, and planning kid's days off; who can work? And, besides, who's going to be reading a blog?
Or perhaps I'm simply a bit worn out from the blitz of four blogs over eight days as I wrote my WAA Philly wrap-ups....
That doesn't mean there isn't a lot going on, though. So I'd thought I'd do a short (truly) call-out of some of the stuff we just announced or have coming up.
Let's start with X Change. When I was picking the 2011 venue, I looked a properties up and down the West Coast. We ended up on Coronado Island in San Diego and it was pretty great. But if you read my blog on that search, it would be apparent that the Coronado was not my first choice. The place I really fell in love with was Terranea in Palos Verdes, Los Angeles. But in 2011, we couldn't get the dates we wanted. So right after wrapping up this year's event we went to them and nailed down 2012. This is, truly, a lovely hotel. It has the usual spectacular setting I look for in X Change, the meeting-rooms are the best I've ever seen, the hotel and rooms are wonderful, and it's very convenient (and easy cab-ride or drive from LAX or Long Beach). It has all benefits of the Monterey Plaza Hotel location without the long drive to Monterey! A Conde Nast "Top 100 Resorts of the World" choice, it also happens to have a nearly ideal setup for X Change.
This is the earliest we've ever had a venue and dates locked in, and, in fact, we're trying to do everything a little earlier this year. Our goal is to let people pick Huddles when they register. This means having Huddle Leaders lined-up in January (instead of May). So we're starting the search for Huddle Leaders right now. That's quite a bit earlier than I originally thought...but if you'd like to take a shot at it, let me know! It's the best job in Web analytics.
We've also been seriously considering an EU-focused X Change in 2012. I haven't quite nailed this one down yet, but if you are EU-based or don't mind a bit of international travel, and might have an interest in leading Huddles for a European X Change (same great conversations, less Coca-Cola), please reach out to me in the next couple of weeks!
On my own personal front, I have some upcoming webinars and white papers I wanted to mention. Scott Wilder and I are going to be doing another of our Social Measurement Webinars in early January. We're planning on tackling Social Media Tools in early January and we're going to be joined by my friend Marshall Sponder. Our plan is to cover a whole of tools, talk about our real-world experiences using them, and try to figure out what features really matter when it comes to Social Media measurement. With three total tool junkies, it should be a lot of fun!
I'm also in the final stages of finishing up a white paper on building a real-time data collection infrastructure for the warehouse. I think it's one of the best white papers I've written and I'm going to be devoting at least one full post to it in the weeks after Thanksgiving when it gets released. I'll probably be putting together a webinar around that as well.
As a companion piece, I'm hoping to release a white paper on our Digital Data Models. It will be an extension of the blogging I've been doing this year. It brings together much of that work and deepens it with some of the technical data modeling that I've been working on for clients.
Exciting times indeed...Happy holidays everyone!
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