By Joe Klein
Freshly baked from the VOICE 2008 conference, we ventured from sunny Southern California to a sun-baked Las Vegas last week for more mid-summer mayhem, also known as the New Media Expo.
The New Media Creative crew hit Sin City on Wednesday night and, after hooking up with a couple cohorts from the Web 2.0 world (Rock and Roll Geek MICHAEL BUTLER and Madpod Maven JA DONNELLY), the party resumed! Appropriately, we stayed at the Hard Rock Hotel, which is just a couple miles from the Las Vegas Convention Center and far cooler than the Las Vegas Hilton in so many ways! Our first night in town we had the pleasure of attending the Joan Jett and The Blackhearts concert poolside at the Southpointe Hotel. Thanks to Joan’s manager KENNY LAGUNA for allowing us to watch the show from right next to the stage.There was definitely a shortage of parties compared to the previous expos held in Ontario, but we did manage to find a couple of them going on in suites at the Las Vegas Hilton. Of course, there were on-going schmoozfests in a few of the hotel’s bars.
We dropped in on a few of the Expo’s breakout sessions and cruised around the exhibit floor a few times during the run of the show. Around noon on Thursday, LEO LAPORTE interviewed me and fellow New Media Voice Guy BILL FORTUNE on TWIT Live. On Friday, SUNNY GAULT of L.A. New Media interviewed us on a live feed from the Ustream booth on the show floor.
We attended the Coverville 500 concert, at the Bally’s Event Center Friday night, which was the Expo’s primary entertainment event. It was quite the cool newmediapalooza, albeit a pretty long show at nearly five hours. It featured very talented and well-known artists from the online world, including JONATHON COULTON and RICHARD CHEESE. Kudos to BRIAN IBBOTT for a very ambitious and well-staged show and heartfelt thanks for tickets to the show!
On the business side, we reconnected with many old friends, associates and colleagues and made several new contacts as well. Glad to report that some good possibilities for productive strategic alliances presented. All in all a pretty good time was had by all. Still, it’s great to be back at home base after 10 days of mid-summer road madness! Next we’ll be at the BLOGWORLD AND NEW MEDIA EXPO, also in Vegas on September 20 and 21. Hope to see you there! Now, here’s some photo highlights of the New Media Expo…….
BILL, JOE AND LEO LAPORTE STREAMING VIDEO LIVE
SUNNY GAULT, JOE AND BILL STREAMING VIDEO LIVE
JOE, TIM BORQUIN AND BILL CC CHAPMAN AND JOE
BRIAN IBBOTT AND JOE JASON VAN ORDEN AND JOE
PAUL COLLIGAN AND JOE JOE AND ROB WALCH
JOE, ANJI BEE AND RYAN LUM JOE AND GEOFF SMITH
JOE AND KAREN BLANCHETTE BILL, JOE AND JADONNELLY
MICHAEL BUTLER GETS COZY WITH THE NEW MEDIA CREATIVE CREW
COVERVILLE 500 CONCERT JOAN JETT AT THE SOUTHPOINTE