Last November, when I came home from Bloggercon in Palo Alto imbued with the holy fire of citizen media I floated the idea of doing a blog conference here in the Grand Strand. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and I got a lot of feedback from people who said they would attend. In fact, I got so much that it frightened me. I was really wondering if I would get more than a dozen or so and if we'd need serious meeting space. Once we crossed the threshold of 50 people saying they'd come, from places like New Jersey and Denver and Seattle I started getting really nervous. If it was going to be that big of a deal, I didn't want to do it half-assed. All of this happened around Thanksgiving last year, which then meant it was the holiday season and life got in the way.

Early this year I did some of the research about booking space and getting hotel deals, weighing the pros and cons of doing it at a college vs not and that sort of thing. The whole idea of doing this here turns on the idea of doing it outside of the tourist season, when hotels and amenities are much cheaper. Ideally, I wanted to do it late enough in the year people could make use of the beach while being early enough to be out of tourist season rates. That suggested the April timeframe, but because of professional commitments I was tied up in late April and the 6 weeks before. That meant I couldn't really organize things before and then had a very narrow window afterwards to get it in before Bike Week and other events made it unwise to hold the conference. Ultimately, the timing just made it impossible to do.

Now I am thinking again about organizing such a thing but I have similar issues. The main thing keeping me from getting serious is that this year there are several conferences in this general area, which reduces the fire for me to set one up. I'll be attending Converge South (Greensboro, NC) in October and the Podcast and Portable Media Expo (Ontario, California) in November and will probably attend Podcastercon (Chapel Hill, NC) in January. Now for me personally, I have to ask the question if after going to 3 different conferences on this general topic between October and January, will I have it in me to organize another one 2 or 3 months later? Is it even necessary? Any feedback is highly appreciated.