Back To Blogging After Domainfest 2010

I have set a record for myself, I went Tues - Friday of this past week without getting on my laptop. I made attempts at starting to boot up but something else would come up and take my attention so I finally just said forget blogging and doing anything not related to DomainFest for the week.

That said, I am back! I spent most of the day catching up on emails and other tasks that were neglected this past week but I wanted to get a few quick notes and thoughts out about the conference, here we go, random and not prioritized except for the very first one:

1) First and foremost thanks to the dotME team, Predrag Lesic and Natasa Djukanovic were an absolute pleasure to meet and spend quite a bit of time with, with the focus on have on developing full businesses on .ME domains it was great to talk to them about the future plans of .ME and how we will continue to work together, thanks for dinner and a great time!

2) Sitting behind a keyboard it is easy to forget sometimes that there are people that are reading what you are writing that you DO NOT hear comments from or talk to on Facebook or Twitter, I was absolutely amazed at the number of people that indicated they read this blog and it inspires me to keep it up. It also gave me a real indication of the type of content they enjoy on this site compared to what they look for on other sites.

3) Morgan Linton is the king of hospitality, Morgan has become a good friend over the past year and but I came real close to booking a hotel instead of staying with him this time out but that would of ruined the whole domainer pad thing we had going with Chef Patrick.

4) One of the key benefits I got out of the whole thing was meeting with account representatives and managers of services that I use daily. It was great to meet Donny and David from Parked.com, which makes me really look forward to Domainer Mardi Gras (Donny, I am glad I had DomainFest to warm up) and also it was great to meet up with Ted Olson from NameMedia, many great things happening with Smartname.com.

5) Now, I did not touch a laptop much but Michael Berkens should get whatever award could be created for being the most dedicated and active blogger EVER. How this man can keep as many posts coming out at TheDomains.com while attending the conference is beyond me. And to top it off his wife Judy and he are the two nicest and fun people you could ever meet.

6) Having a one on one lunch with Ron Jackson from DNJournal.com is a great experience, it was a great to get Ron's thoughts on what is happening in the industry and where it is going.

7) Although the sessions were great, these shows are about networking. With few exceptions I managed to find time to meet and have discussions with everyone I had on my list to discuss either business with or just general meet and greet type conversations. What was really great was to get some time to talk to those people who I exchange emails with or have talked to on the phone over the past year.

Tony Hsieh from Zappos.com was great, anyone that is wanting to understand how to hire the right people and take care of customers should pay attention. I really do not typically get to excited about rah rah keynotes and theory based talks. Tony is the real deal and it was great to hear his refreshing take. I know most domainers are not trying to build companies with tons of employees, but as someone who has worked in bad examples of companies it was nice to hear thoughts on how to do it right as I am in the midst of it.

9) Sitting in the live auction was great, watching LoanCalculator.com go for 215K was awesome actually.

10) Having a great geo domain development discussion with Michael Castello at the Southern California domainer meetup was great, I had talked to David in the past but this was the first conversation I had with Michael. Good people always willing to help.

11) I was truly surprised to hear the support of most people on how I am going about the geo .ME thing, for the most part the comments were extremely positive (I was curious before I left for the trip if I should wear a flack jacket...).

12) Frank Schilling is a fun guy, witty, was nice to get a comment about my little collection of 25 state .MEs from him.

13) Has anyone found my socks????

14) As many have heard, after traveling for the past 10 years and never missing my wife's birthday I did manage to miss it this week, it was on Thursday, do I need to explain what party happened on Thursday and then explain how wonderful my wife actually is!

Back to real blogging tomorrow. There are a thousand items I could put in this post to summarize the week but I think everyone else has done a great job with the news and no need to keep rehashing it.