Webinar Wire

Welcome To Webinar Wire!

Posted by Ken Molay November 5 2007 6:00 AM EST

Welcome to a truly new experience in coverage of the burgeoning web event services market! The Webinar Wire is a community publishing source for sharing news, best practices, information, stories, and opinions about web-based events and the technologies and people that support them.

I say "events" to differentiate our focus from the associated field of collaborative web meetings. This multi-author publishing site will concentrate instead on web seminars and webcasts... Venues designed primarily to disseminate information to an audience. Marketing presentations, lead generation activities, customer training, investor relations presentations, public service instructional/informational offerings - these are examples of web events.

Web events foster a set of concerns and feature requirements that are distinct from the needs of basic collaborative group meetings such as brainstorming sessions and department status meetings. Events reach larger audiences, on a multitude of technology platforms. They may incorporate registration, payment collection, polling and other structured audience feedback methodologies. They often tie in to lead management issues such as event promotion, source tracking, attendee management, reporting, and so on. Web events also place a premium on the skills and experience of the people on stage, such as the speakers, moderators and guests, to the people behind the scenes, such as the sponsors, producers, coordinators, and publicists.

Webinar Wire is different than the usual corporate or personal blog in that we accept writings from external sources -- you, the people in the web event services market. Do you have something to say about web seminars? You are able to write your own blog entry and submit it. We want to hear from technology vendors, service providers, and end-users of webinar technology. You can even use this as a public forum to ask for feedback, advice, or problem solving. Readers can comment on any entry.

Of course there are guidelines. All blog submissions are first reviewed for relevance and appropriateness. That means we will review each submission and make a decision on whether we want to post it for public consumption. We may exercise editorial privilege to clean up typos, misspellings, and grammatical errors. We will not accept blatant marketing pitches, so don't just submit a puff piece about how wonderful your product is. We won't be reprinting formal press releases (although we will make reference to press releases that are out on the wires).

What are examples of entries that you can easily post? We love tips and tricks, guidelines, and best practices for companies producing web seminars or webcasts. We want to hear your opinions about new developments and significant news items that occur in the industry (where was this site during the Cisco/WebEx acquisition?!?). We want to hear about interesting uses of web conferencing technology for your events. And let us know about regional differences and the state of the market in countries other than the United States. We need to expand the industry vision to a global perspective.

So fire up your keyboards and prepare to join in the fun. Whether you just sit back and read, comment on existing articles, or write your own, we look forward to counting you as part of the webinar community.