Convention Spotlight: Tigercon!

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Looking for other ways to add professional and career elements to your convention?  I've been contacting a few conventions to find out just what they're doing in that regard.

Tigercon, an event in Towson, Maryland (north of Baltimore), is a friendly university convention that had two neat additions you may want to use for your own convention:

First, if you want some pro guests, see about getting patronage from a larger convention to help set you up.  You may easily make some contacts or get some new ideas – and even find if you have some local or other guests that may be interested in helping out.

Secondly, keep cultural education in mind especially if you're, say, an anime convention.  People have interests in learning about other cultures, it helps add to the overall feel if you want to add more educational tracks, and you can often get help from local establishments, universities, and cultural centers.

Thanks to the folks at Tigercon – and if you're in the area, check it out!

-Steven Savage

Facebook and distribution

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Idle speculation time here.

With Facebook pretty much dominating social media, and having obvious gaming aspirations, I began to wonder what else Facebook can deliver.  Once I began theorizing, I really began to wonder more.

Facebook could actually be useful as a way to distribute artistic (comic and manga) and written fiction.  Easy for alerts, easy to notify people it's ready, incredibly easy to get more fans to buy into it.  Nice, public distribution that makes people very aware of what their friends are doing and reading.

Facebook could be an excellent distribution platform – read the manga there, discuss it with your friends, etc.  There's already a lot of this in place now – and the widget creation could let OTHER companies do it while Facebook enjoys the piggybacking and additional attention (and possibly cash).

As its my firm belief community building is a big part of success for media efforts, especially new ones, Facebook is a logical place to try or do some of it.  You want to build and maintain an audience – that's one of the ways to do it very fast (with some limits).  A retained, happy, engaged audience buys more of your stuff when it comes down to it, and is more likely to want to see you at a con or invite you to one.

Do I think this is where media distribution is going?  No.  Part part of it doubtlessly will try, far more than is being done now.  I await seeing the results.

– Steven Savage

News of the Day 8/3/2009

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Career:
Dan Schwabel on colleges, value, and personal branding – He makes a good and rather disturbing point on how colleges don't prepare people to connect and promote themselves in the career world.

Blogging leads to job opportunities – A NO BS account of how a blogger used his blog and networking to land a job.

Economics/Freakonomics/Geekonomics:
Recent economic number in graphs – Pure graphrotica for econofans. Possibly not so useful for people not into heavy economics, but presented for interest.

Anime and Manga:
How to get your anime/manga proposal rejected – Ten ways to completely screw up.

Social Media:
Nintendo DSi's Facebook connect goes life – It really only posts photos, but it's a further example of social integration – and ahead of the PSP obviously. However this is also another boost for Facebook, further cementing them in the social media space. Between this and phone apps social media/portable/mobile integration is pretty much a given, its just how much companies will do. Jobwise of course, connecting portables to social media is obviously a good area to be-in . . .

Technology:
The Everything Wars continue as Google launches an ad campaign clearly targeted at Microsoft Office. Not a bad idea – and it covers up the embarassment of the Twitter leak issue (even if the person getting into the company's Google apps just used some social engineering). It continues – so what's Microsoft going to do in retaliation the next week or two?

Appropriate to the above, a look at why Microsoft Word should die – This is a must read for technicians, writers, and anyone using a lot of word processing. He makes the simple point that word stopped being ABOUT document delivery awhile ago, while retaining all the features of it and then some.

Who's fault is it Google Voice was rejected off of iPhone? AT&T points the finger at Apple. Thus it continues. Apple is further under the spotlight now, and they handed competitors a marketing opportunity. I want to see what other rejected apps may come out and what ic an mean for Apple.

Video Games:
Zynga is now number one in amount of online gamers using its services – I see nobody is surprised. For those of you in the job market, please note there are a LOT of open jobs there . .

170 Million Americans play games – Part of a larger report. Note that this covers almost all kinds of gamers.

Is it impossible to launch a new IP in the holiday game market? – Michael de Plater of Ubisoft thinks so. Gaming's success has altered it's own market dynamics, and gaming will need to adjust. I think this is a big enough issue that people in gaming need to pay more attention to release schedules than they did even a few years ago – both on development and support. It also suggests to me that new IP really needs to avoid Christmas and find a "killer" time to get put out.

– Steven Savage