There’s a great-looking conference coming up at the end of January, and you don’t want to miss out on early registration before December 15th. One of the keynote speakers is Salim Ismail from Confabb, a website that helps you find and keep track of conferences – 81,000 of them according to the number on the front page! Another keynote speaker wrote Content Management Bible! It’s The Rockley Group’s Intelligent Content conference, being held Jan 29-30, 2009 in sunny, mild Palm Springs, CA.
I know when all the news spreads fear, uncertainty, and doubt about layoffs, bail-outs, hair cuts, and belt-tightening, it’s harder to justify the cost of a conference registration. But these times are also times to put the slash in your career and learn something new, or finish up a nagging project to get some closure. While learning the news that former fellow coworker writers were laid off this week, I was reminded of Ann Rockley’s post titled “Light at the End of the Tunnel.” Here’s a quote that stuck with me:
The next one started off the worst, this was 2001. It began violently and unexpectedly. All our business disappeared in a 3 week period, and I mean all. This time I had staff, and the question was what to do. Many people had been with me for years. I decided to hunker down and keep my staff. Together we wrote the book we had been talking about for years, Managing Enterprise Content and unexpectedly got a contract we had bid on four years before! Without that period of focus I’m not sure if the book would ever have become a reality.
This winter might be just the right time to get out to some conferences, meet new people, and learn about managing ever-changing content – content that actually pays the bills like new media sites, or content that connects creator and consumer like blogs do.