>This past Saturday, at 8:30pm local time, cities, landmarks, and buildings in 134 countries around the world — including many convention centers and hotels — turned off their lights to mark Earth Hour 2011.
The event was begun in 2007 in Sydney, Australia, where more than two million people and 2,000 businesses turned off their lights for an hour to bring attention to climate change, energy consumption, and sustainability.
As the pictures linked below will attest, Earth Hour this year was a startling and moving reminder of our relatively small place in …

>This past Saturday, at 8:30pm local time, cities, landmarks, and buildings in 134 countries around the world — including many convention centers and hotels — turned off their lights to mark Earth Hour 2011.
The event was begun in 2007 in Sydney, Australia, where more than two million people and 2,000 businesses turned off their lights for an hour to bring attention to climate change, energy consumption, and sustainability.
As the pictures linked below will attest, Earth Hour this year was a startling and moving reminder of our relatively small place in …

>One of my favorite things about meetings is that they involve so many different facets of human experience — education, conversation, entertainment, food, aesthetics, travel, and on and on. Judging by the Thought Leader Summit that kicked off the IACC Americas Chapter 2011 Annual Conference on Wednesday, I’m not the only one who feels this way, because what was most notable about the lineup of panelists was their varied areas of expertise: Terri Breining, CMP, CMM, principal with the Breining Group and a practitioner of Meeting Architecture (read a Convene …

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Coming to the end of a long, terrible week for Japan, there’s not much to do but try to help keep the focus on what seems sure to be an ongoing crisis. You can make a donation to the Red Cross via PCMA’s homepage. And you can read the latest update from the Japan National Tourism Organization here; it begins on a simple, heartfelt note that makes you want to cry: “We are grateful for the warm support and thoughts from many people after the historic earthquake in Japan on …

>As the images of the massive devastation in Japan continue to flow in, there comes the time when you just have to do something.

And that’s what happened at SXSW Interactive, in Austin, where Rob Wu of the digital fund-raising platform CauseVox, and bloggers Leigh Durst from LivePath and Deb Ng launched a social media campaign to raise funds to aid in the disaster just hours after it occurred, using the hashtag #sxswcares and a quickly assembled website, sxsw4japan.org.

The campaign, which partnered with the Red Cross,  began with a goal of $10,000 — which …