Four days to go and as co-organizer of the conference, I can tell you that not only do we have a dynamite lineup of speakers and an exhibit hall full of key vendors and interesting new startups in the blogging and new media space, but we have some rockin’ evening events too.
To start, I’ll confirm the rumor that Mark Cuban is in! He’ll be delivering one of our keynote sessions and I can’t wait to introduce him (I just don’t want to dance with him). Like Ted Turner and Richard Branson, Mark’s another of those larger than life people, and whatever he says, I’m sure it’ll be exciting and darn interesting.
If I can name drop, how about a few more of our speakers? Leo Laporte will be talking about podcasting, Matt Mullenweg from WordPress will be talking about the future of blogging, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch will be, well, who knows what he’ll talk about :-), Om Malik of GigaOm will be talking about the cult of blogging, and in the political corner we’ll have Glenn Reynolds from Instapundit, John Hinderaker of Powerline, Matt Burden of BlackFive and sports blogger Will Leitch of Deadspin, among many, many great speakers!

That by itself should be enough to get you to Las Vegas for the latter end of this week, Nov 7-9, at the Las Vegas Convention Center (tip: register here), but if it isn’t, let me tell you a bit about some of our evening entertainment…
First off, I hope you’ve read the powerful book The Kite Runner? If so, you’ll be excited to learn that we’ll be hosting a private screening of the movie coming out later this month. Not cool enough? Immediately following the movie, film critic and nationally syndicated radio personality Michael Medved will conduct a Q&A with The Kite Runner’s lead actor, Khalid Abdalla!
That’ll be a must-attend event for film junkies like myself, but how about the smooth urban jazz/hip-hop of LA singer Jha Voice? She and her band will be entertaining us at the Hard Rock Cafe in Vegas: we’ve booked the entire place for one evening of great entertainment too. Sweet, eh? But that’s not all. When Jha Voice isn’t jammin, we’ll have DJ Steveboy (aka blogger Steve Boyett) spinning the tracks to keep us moving and having a great time!
As you can tell, we’ve not just pulled together the very best blogging and new media event in the industry, but we’re pulling out all the stops to ensure that the entire event is rockin’, not just the speaking sessions and exhibit hall!
Need further proof of how many industry luminaries will be joining us? Consider our list of sponsors: FastCompany, Yahoo, AOL, InvestorVillage, Technorati, Townhall, Military.com, WordPress, Microsoft’s Zune division, BusinessWire, Marketing Sherpa and Southwest Airlines, among many others.
Let’s cut to the chase. We’ll have well over a thousand bloggers and people interested in learning more about blogging, new media, podcasting, videocasting, and how they can have a significant impact on the world through their own efforts. Shouldn’t you be there too?
It’s not too late! Check out our site for a full lineup of speakers and exhibitors, then make yourself a last-minute hotel reservation (personally, I’m staying in Paris), register for the conference itself and join us in Las Vegas this week for a blockbuster event!
I’ll hope to see you there.