Posts Tagged ‘IzeaHunt’
Izeafest: Night 3 – IzeaHunt
I would like to say that I was sober for the entire time I was at Izeafest. I ended up as the driver 2 out of the 3 nights, and I really don’t believe in drunk driving. That being said I did do the IzeaHunt without anything alcohol in me. We had to do a ton of wild and crazy things. What was at stake? A $100 gift card for Home Depot for all of us. When money is on the line, well, you do crazy things. Honestly I wish I would have brought some other outdoor clothing with. My clothes were almost destroyed from this scavenger hunt. It took several washings once I got home to get the shaving cream and chocolate sauce out!
For some reason, I cannot find my team photos on Flickr at all. What I will do is show you some of the other teams instead. You will see how crazy this really did get:
Ohh I take that back, I did find one and you can’t see me (yeah! — I’m in the blue shirt):
Ok, we had to do crazy things like take a picture with a 6’5″ person, make a human sundae, get pineapple and a potato, walk somebody else’s dog, etc. There was 4 pages of things, and we only had about an hour to try and do as much as we could. One of the more crazy things we had to do was find a toilet seat and bring it back. I think Ted was the only one who was able to do that! Unfortunately, my team did not win. However, it was still a ton of fun!
After the hunt was over, we all took a break, sat down, talked, and ate some great food. I was able to sit down and talk to Cass and Sean Jackson. It was hard to believe that I was going to be hopping on a plane the next morning and heading back home (what I didn’t know at this time was that Chicago had gotten record levels of rain and my yard was literally a swimming pool. The water in my yard was up to my knees!). We were able to compare notes and just enjoy ourselves.
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Izeafest – Day 2
We learned on Day 1 that we had to get there bright and early to make sure that we got a plugin for our laptops. Without that, day one didn’t have a lot of blogging or twittering going on. Well, at least not from me. Day 2 started with a keynote speech from Merlin Mann. I have to say that it was one of the best keynote speeches I have ever heard. His speech was about “don’t be a dick”. Everything he said was true. He even asked the audience to disagree with what he said, but no one did, because he was right.
The next panel was Social Network and included Michael Brito, Sean Bonner, Etan Horowitz, and Lena West. This was another panel that really wasted my time. First, we had Lena West stating that she was too busy to actually do it herself. My first question was then why are you on this panel? Then she managed to offend half the room (google: Lena West and mommybloggers to find out why. Trust me, there was no
airbrush do over. The more she tried to explain herself, the worse it got). They pretty much said to use Twitter and Facebook. Umm, yeah, knew that already. Now, tell me how to use them to help me, because I really don’t get Facebook at all. There are also dozens of social networking sites out there — and nobody even mentioned them.
Next, there was Loren Feldman. I love Loren Feldman. He speaks his mind, and he makes awesome videos! It was almost breathtaking to hear what equipment he uses. We learned that you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to do good videos on your blog.
Next, we had the plug-in panel with Loren Baker, Jonathan Dingman, and Erik Hersman. This was definitely cool, because I learned I am using a lot of the wordpress plugins that I should be!
Last, there was the Blog Design Makeover Panel with Scott Allen,Matt Blancarte, and Christopher Schmitt. My only complaint with this is that they were very rushed. Also, the designs were nice, but way out of the price range of us normal bloggers.
In a nutshell, that was the conference. I have one more post about the IzeaHunt that we did, and that will pretty much summarize the conference. Would I go again? I’ll be honest — I don’t know. It is a lot of money. Did I learn things? Yes. However, does any of it help me to monetize? Not really. I really thing they need to have breakout sessions, and you can pick and choose what sessions to go to. That way, you can reach the middle ground bloggers and the beginning bloggers. What I found lacking was that none of the big name big money bloggers really told us how to get from middle group to up on top. Telling me what you are doing now really doesn’t help me all that much.
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