Don’t forget the deadline to take advantage of the Early Registration discount for the annual meeting ends after April 13th. On April 14th the price goes up considerably, so take advantage of the opportunity and register now.
If you have already registered and you are planning on attending you better get a room fast. The Hilton is comepletely out of rooms, leaving the Hyatt as your hotel option.
If you are going there a lot of online resources to help connect you with others:
- Official Blog -The Official Blog is up and bloggers are posting information about the meeting. Feed: http://npc.mlanet.org/mla11/?feed=rss2
- CrowdVine Site – MLA has set up a spot on CrowdVine as the social networking site for MLA 2011. You can use it to see who else is attending, their interests, and chat.
Feed: http://mlanet.crowdvine.com/sites/activity?format=rss - Twitter Feed – Follow live online discussions about the conference using the Twitter feed. If you are posting don’t forget to use #mlanet11 in your post so that others can see it too. The Top Tech Trends hashtag is #mlattt
Feed: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23mlanet11
Top Tech Trends Feed: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23mlattt - CoverItLive – “Live from Minneapolis, It’s MLA!” Watch live video from the meeting.
Feed: - Facebook Event Page – If you are already on Facebook, why not check out the MLA Facebook Event Page.
- Flickr Group– Shutterbugs, don’t forget to MLANet Group Pool so you can add photos to the site for other to see. Feed:
Now if you are bit like me and look this list and think, wow those are a lot of places to find out about MLA. I don’t have time to look at every site. Never Fear, use a feed reader (that is why I included the feeds for these sites) to group all of these things together. That way you go to one place to see updates from all of these sites.
I use Netvibes to gather feeds, take a look at my screenshot. On the left hand side I created a tab for Annual Meeting Info, underneath are all of the feeds I subscribe to for the meeting. In the main frame, all of the feeds are displayed for me to read. Take a look at the icons underneath More than 2 days ago, you will notice they are different. That shows you where the feed is coming from. As you can see there are multiple icons meaning that my multiple feeds are all in the main frame available to read. Easy peasy.
If I want to share my feeds I simply hover my mouse over thet title and a curved arrow, clock, and double arrow are displayed. (On the screenshot look at the Nicollet Mall article, listed third below More than 2 days ago.) The curved arrow allows you to share that “article” via Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.
So not only are you able to read about what is going on but you can participate and continue the discussion by commenting on events.
Hurry up register, get your hotel room, and set up your feeds. If you can’t make to Minneapolis this year we will miss you. I highly recommend you registering for the e-conference (only $100 if you register before May 16th) and follow events via the feeds.
I’m all set! I just joined the Flickr group pool. It is easy to post photos to your account and add them to the pool: http://www.flickr.com/help/groups/#57