There's no denying it. Technology Meetings is basically an old media production - paper, ink, and a little glue. And when you think about it, at its heart, so is a meeting - chairs, a lectern, and a whole lot of bodies. But while we spend many of our pages exploring how meetings and meeting management are evolving to take advantage of new e-tools - Internet registration and housing, webcasting, networked training centers, online site searches and RFPs, and so on - more needs to be said about how Technology Meetings itself is adding new media components. Here are three projects we have in the works right now.
Feedback Mechanism: In an economy where the Internet is changing everything, it should come as no surprise that it's also changing the way companies make decisions. In our case, we'll be making decisions about TM's content by enlisting your help - electronically. About the time you receive this issue, expect an e-mail asking you to follow a link to an online readership survey. Spend five minutes of your time helping us refine TM's features, columns, and news content, and I promise I'll spend the time it takes to create the magazine you ask for - old media and new. If you didn't get the link, go to www.meetingsnet.com/tm/survey.
All Spiffed Up: MeetingsNet, our Web site (www.meetingsnet.com), one of the best sources for event planning information on the Web, completed a redesign this fall. Among the changes: You can now search our free article archives - our best feature in my opinion - right from the home page, and a new "M Files" section catalogs our online mini-magazines on specific meeting planning topics.
Dot-com Comments: And finally, we're building interactivity into our old-media articles. We've put our first-ever Dot-com Review, a guide to online meeting tools that appears in this issue (see page 69), on the MeetingsNet Web site, adding an interactive twist. You now can post your own reviews of the online products in the guide - just point your browser to www.meetingsnet.com/dot-comreview.
On another topic: There's still space available at Meeting Visions 2000, an educational symposium exploring emerging technologies and their impact on the meetings industry co-sponsored by TM and the Maui Economic Development Board. (Did you know that Maui is home to one of the world's fastest supercomputers?) You may have received an e-mail invitation to the four-day forum coming up in early December; if not, go to www.mauitechnologyforum.com for details.
Keep in touch and let me know what you think of our evolution into the new media world. I'm at shatch@aip.com.
