Todd Biske: Outside the Box

I’ve decided to conduct an experiment. In the past, I’ve been contacted about posting information regarding events on SOA, either via a comment to an existing post, or through an email request. I’ve passed on these, but at the same time, I do like the fact that I’ve built up a reader base and my goal has always been to increase the knowledge of others on SOA and related topics.

What I’ve decided to try is having one post per month dedicated to SOA events that will be occuring in the near future, in addition to this permanent page on the blog that people can review when they please. I’m not about to go culling the web for all events, but I will collect all events that I receive in email at soaevents at biske dot com, and post a summary of them including dates, topic, discount code, and link to the detail/registration page. Readers would be free to post additional events in comments, however, I don’t think very many people subscribe to the comment feed, so the exposure would be less than having it in my actual post. I’m going to try to leverage a Google Calendar (iCal, HTML) for this, which will also be publicly available, even if someone wants to include it their own blog.

While this is essentially free marketing, in reality, I’d make a few more cents by having more visitors to this site than I would if all of these events organizers threw their ads into the big Google Ad Pool with the hopes of it actually showing up on my site. If I get a decent number of events from multiple sources the first two months, I’ll probably keep it up. If I only get events from one source, I’ll probably stop, as it will begin to look like I’m doing marketing just for them and I don’t want anyone to have the perception that my content is influenced by others.

The doors are open. Send your SOA, EA, and BPM events to me at soaevents at biske dot com. Include:

• Date/Time
• Subject/Title
• Description (keep it to one or two sentences)
• URL for more detail/registration
• Discount code, if applicable

If you want to simply send an iCal event, that would probably work as well, and it would make it very easy for me to move it into Google Calendar. My first post will be on Feb. 1, the next on March 1, and so on. I will post events for the current month and the next month, and may include April depending on how many events I receive.

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