Rooting through a few old moleskine notebooks, I found a short list of my top five (most enjoyed) college classes. It looks like it’s in no particular order since they’re dotted not numbered. Here was my list:

• Screenwriting
• Econ 311: International Econ
• English (w/ Professor Fineman)
• Journalism
• Physics 105: Light & Relativity

Kinda says a little bit about me when you look at this list, doesn’t it?

I think people go to events for several reasons. But the biggest reason people go to events is to be with the other people at the event.

When you create an event, you are creating an ad-hoc network of people. A group of humans who are going to share an experience, and create relationships that would otherwise not be possible.

Hopefully they will learn something new, but you can teach courses online. If the point is to just learn about new techniques or tools, why travel?

So it matters who comes to your event. This is one reason we keep a guest list or our Tweet Houses. When we host a conference it costs several hundred dollars to attend, so the problem solves itself: the people who come are people who want to get something out of the experience, because they paid to attend. At a free event, we need to crete another gateway.

Just remember, if you’re putting together an event: the “who” is as important (or more) as the “what” and the “where.”

I’ve always wanted to write a blog post on a subway. I don’t know why, maybe because it’s one of those things that you just can’t do in Seattle.

It also seems like the subway is good thinking space.

I’m in New York City this week attending Web 2.0 Expo. A lot of people are arriving today, and I’m looking forward to tonight’s ignite talks.

Web 2.0 looks like it’s going to be a good event, which is always inspiring to me, and leaves me with plenty of new ideas for our own events and parties, plus I get to see friends that I really only see at these events.

That’s it for my subway blogging this trip, I’m at my destination. What a good way to spend the time.

When I first started working, at the end of college and into my first year of “real world” employment, I was scared of the phone.

Email and Instant Messaging offered ways to communicate that didn’t put the same kind of pressure on me; I could check in with people before I gave a response to any given question. I could always put my best foot forward. No grammatical errors.

When I had to get a bid from a supplier or figure out details for a mass mailing (we no longer send snail mail brochures for our events, of course), I would always try communicating digitally before, with great reluctance, I would pick up the phone and call someone.

Over time I’ve grown to love the phone. Now I find myself e-mailing people and asking when they’re available to talk on the phone or, even better, meet up in person.

Everyone is just a person. It turns out that work can be a lot more fun if you take the trouble to deal with people instead of a checklist. That’s one of the things I really enjoy about the event business. At the end of the day, my work is really about getting people to have fun.

It’s taken me a few years, but I am no longer scared of the phone. How cool.

Editer: .@Moniguzman is essentially dictating the manual on how to report in real time – story of response to cop shootings. #processjournalism

Apparently “Something is technically wrong” with my Twitter account, which means I can’t tweet. Here’s to seeing if I can tweet via my blog.

(no spoilers)

Without question, Avatar is the best movie I’ve seen this year. Despite the fact that they’ve got Papyrus plastered all over the thing.

The visual effects were astonishing, the story was some crazy amalgam of Pocahontas and The Last Samurai, and the script was so polished and tightly written that it makes you wonder why they bother making movies that aren’t this well put together.

The movie is long, but not in any sense too long. You’re given almost an hour to get used to this alien world and ecology before the story really starts running, but investing that times makes the rest of the movie well worth the time.

I’m at the SDMA Market to the Max conference at Bell Harbor today, and as Steve Broback already noted on Twitter, there are hardly any laptops in the room.

The unfortunate corollary to that: no plugs, either. Last time I was here (Gnomedex 8.0) you couldn’t go five feet without finding a power strip, which is awesome. As it is, I’ll have to make do with the awkwardly place one on the end of the row.

What’s going on at the SDMA Conference? Check my occasional notes at the Parnassus Group blog, like this summaryof the keynote.

I’m finally reading Gladwell’s Outliers (on my iPhone, through the Kindle app), and I’ve realized the huge flaw in the 10,000 hours chapter – I’ve easily spent that many hours writing, and I can’t write for shit. ;)

I’m pretty sure that’s actually the log-line from the AT&T commercial for these internet cards. I picked one up (from AT&T) the other day because I got incredibly tired of wanting on all the time but not actually having one.

This is perfect timing because it’s just before I’m headed for Washington DC and the inauguration. It means I will be totally wired in to my addiction the entire time that I’m traveling, and it also means that YOU, good reader, will benefit by hearing/seeing more of my blather/artsy photos.

The reason I went with the AT&T stick is actually because it’s the best option, not just because I’m on AT&T. Sprint is super expensive, and has bandwidth limits. Clearwire is cheap, awesome, and doesn’t work on the Mac. Verizon is kinda expensive, and has ridiculous bandwidth limits (try 5mb per month on the “cheap” plan).

The one I got has no bandwidth limit and is the same price as the “cheap” Verizon one. Seems like some simple math to me.

Anyways, I can now get online practically anywhere. In the long run, this is probably going to be a bad thing.

I read recently that people have more active (read: smarter) brains if they get regular exercise. I believe it because I tend to do a lot of thinking while I work out.

So it occurs to me that I ought to do more blogging while I work out.

This blog has suffered the attrition of both Eat Sleep Publish and Twitter over the past year, plus I haven’t felt like writing as much as I have in the past.

Which is really fine, because this blog has never been as much about catering to a crowd or a topic as much as it has been about putting my thoughts out there on these thar internets. That other people happen to read it is entirely accidental.

But over the past few weeks I’ve been devouring the work of my new second-favorite sci fi author and blogger John Scalzi (my favorite being Timothy Zahn), which has had the effect of making me want to spend more time on my middle school hobby: writing sci fi.

And so I wrote a three-page sci fi short over my winter vacation that I’m actually fairly proud of, and that I’m going to submit to Analog on the off chance thy they want to publish it.

We’ll see what happens. I’m pretty sure you’ll hear about it if they say yes.

It’s funny every time I look at it.

Those were the droids I was looking for!

I always have a little laugh when I see ugly sites talking about simple and elegant design. Which is probably why I don’t talk about simple and elegant design very much.

I think it’s about time to do a reboot on the design here at Jason-Preston.com.

Although I’ve been part of putting together and marketing both the Blog Business Summit and the Web Community Forum conferences over the past two years, this is the first time I’ve attempted to host an event entirely by myself.

The Pitch, which happens September 18th, 2008, will hopefully go as well as those other events. Of course, it’s free to attend, which means I don’t have to spend so much time trying to convince people it’s worth the money.

Still it is an experiment, and I’m as much curious to see how it goes as I am invested in its success. Here are three tips I would offer to anyone else looking to host a small, local event:

1. Venue first – figure out how big you want your event to be (10 people? 30 people? 70 people?), and then find an appropriate venue and check their calendar. The venue and its capabilities—is there Wi-Fi? a Projector? Stadium seating? A microphone?—will play a large part in defining what your event will be. Look carefully for places where you can host an event for free. They can be found, and for a small event it’s critical to keep your cost low.
2. Confirm a few attendees before launching – with a new event, especially a small one, it’s critical to launch with some momentum. In other words, people love to be the 5th or 6th on a bandwagon. Get friends, family, or close contacts to commit to a date before you announce the event, and make sure people can see that others have already signed up.
3. Use a free event service – sites like Upcoming are great for managing guest lists. The less friction the better (think one-click purchases from Amazon), so picking one with wide adoption in your target community is important. Also, having one official guest list is essential for events that have a max capacity – it’s nearly impossible to manage who gets in and who doesn’t if you have 50 attendees on 4 different lists for an event that can only accommodate 30 people.

If you’re interested in the future of publishing, be sure to follow the conversation at Eat Sleep Publish, and if you’re in Seattle, don’t forget to put your name on the guest list for The Pitch this September. Space runs out at 25!

You know how three is the great, classic number of things to list when you’re writing?

Apples can be sliced, arranged, and eaten.

Hurricanes are loud, dangerous, and circular.

Four is totally the new three, at least for me. I keep writing lists of three and then adding one more, just because I think it sounds better.

It changes the cadence, meaning, pace, and emphasis of your statement. This is one more than enough.

Of course I could be alone on this ; )

It’s always been a mystery to me why one of the first people to really get blogging took so long to set up a personal blog. I’ve watched my boss, Steve Broback, try to fit all kinds of insane (but interesting) topics under the umbrella of business blogging or social media just so he can get away with posting it.

Now he doesn’t need to go searching for excuses anymore.

For your regular dose of Broback, go ahead and add his feed to your reader.

This is a post that I wrote in November of 2006 but left in the drafts folder. Given my current plans to launch Eat Sleep Publish on Monday I found it an interesting read.

I love magazines. I love the paper. I love the sound. I love flipping through the colorful plastic pages to the cover story. I love the surprising witticisms. I love the editorial columns.

Magazines are amazing.

My dad has subscribed to Wired for as long as I can remember. It makes me sad that they’re no longer printing on square paper, but I still think it’s a great magazine, and I’m sure I’ll probably get my own subscription before the end of the year [ I did not - jp ]. I’ve subscribed to PC Gamer since 1995, which is almost the entire time it’s existed, and it just keeps getting better (except their internet division – for some reason they’re a bit slow in that department).

For years I was sure that when I came down to school in L.A. I’d do my damndest to get an internship with PC Gamer – after all, I play more video games than I have time to, and I love to write, and I’m a geek at heart. What better place for me in the world?

But I’ve e-mailed PC Gamer several times over the past ten years (sometimes for contests, sometimes for letters to the editor, sometimes to yell at them for idiocy) and never gotten a response. So I haven’t ended up fetching coffee for Greg Vederman (or even Steve Klett).

So instead I blog maniacally about whatever I choose, write occasionally for my school newspaper about things that nobody in college should actually care about, and continue to subscribe to the magazine.

Someday I’ll do something for a magazine. I like writing too much to spend my entire life without making that kind of opportunity for myself. Maybe I’ll start my own magazine with a few friends. Maybe I’ll help a few friends start theirs.

Inspired in part by Teresa. It cracks me up.