What’s New with CMEpalooza?

This Fall marks the 14th iteration of CMEpalooza. That includes the inaugural two-day free-for-all in the spring of 2014 during the BSE (Before Scott Era) and then 13 Spring/Fall events featuring the best duo since the Captain and Tennille. Every year, Derek and I try to make some minor changes to the way we do things, many of which our audience probably doesn’t even notice. Like the year when Derek suggested that we “get crazy haircuts” the week before our live event. I went to my neighborhood barber to give him carte blanche and he laughed at me. He’s mean.

But anyway…

For this Fall’s event, being held next Wednesday, October 14 between 9 am-5 pm ET, there are more “new” things than usual, so I wanted to get everyone prepared:

1. The biggest change is with our LIVE page, otherwise known as the page where you view our sessions. In previous years, we would stream each session on the same page and force learners to refresh their page every hour to view the next session. No more. Thanks to technological advances of our production platform, StreamYard, we are now able to pre-schedule all of our sessions, which means that we can also create unique pages to view all of our sessions. So now, when you go to our LIVE page on the day of our live broadcast, you just need to click on the link to the session you want to view. If you are really, really bored, you can even click on each link now and just sit there staring at the screen until the session begins. The staring record is 22 hours, 17 minutes, 19 seconds. Email Derek if you beat it.
2. It’s not that Derek and I are cheap (OK, maybe we are), but we’ve always used the “free” version of whatever recording platform we were using at the time (note from Derek: we did this to make a point. Mission accomplished, I think.) Consequently, you would always see a little icon with the logo of that platform on the screen of our sessions. This year, I finally convinced Derek to be a grownup and pony up some of his hardly-earned cash to upgrade to the lowest tier of StreamYard’s paid plan. So now you’ll see the CMEpalooza logo in the top right corner of each session. Super important, I know.
3. A few years ago, we offered all of our brilliant CMEpalooza sponsors the opportunity to embed a promotional video beneath their listing. We would typically have 2 or 3 sponsors who took us up on the offer. For whatever reason, this fall we’ve had way more people asking us to put up their videos than usual. As of this writing, there are 10 promotional visits you can check out. Many of these are quite slick.
4. We’ve used Poll Everywhere as our audience response technology for the last few CMEpaloozas. It’s fairly simple to program and run, so we now offer it to our session panelists. I don’t know that everyone will use it this Fall, but a fair number will (and for the anchor 4 pm Trivia session, you absolutely will need Poll Everywhere to play along). Not a bad idea to download the app to your phone/device in advance. Our meeting “handle” is CMEpalooza000. If you don’t want to download another app, you’ll be able to go to this link.
5. While it’s totally voluntary, we are asking everyone to tell us a little about yourself by going to this link. Like I said, not mandatory, but if you want to let us know how amazing you are, this is the link you need to click on. So please, click on this link.

You know what’s not changing about CMEpalooza? The cost. CMEpalooza remains and will always be free for everyone to watch. No pre-registration, no credit cards numbers, no nothing. Every year, we always get a few people emailing us to ask “How do I register for CMEpalooza?” We tell them the same thing – you don’t. You just show up whenever you want to. Missed a live session? View it in the Archives. Also for free.