It Won't Stay in Vegas (Especially If You're A Blogger)

What happens in Vegas this week won’t stay here for too long.  If you have been watching or reading any media at all this week, you have seen all the rampant coverage of everything from CES.  Being here at the epicenter of the hype has been an interesting experience.  Think of it as a cross between a museum exhibit of never before seen artwork, and walking past storefront display windows on 5th Avenue.  If you have been to a normal tradeshow, you’re used to booths where products are showcased by booth babes and just about everyone has a digital camera to capture the babes and pretend that they’re photographing the products.  CES is the same thing, only multiplied.  The booths here go on and on, and fill not just one huge convention center, but dozens of hotels around town as well.  The toughest thing to get used to is the pace.  The event itself publishes a magazine called CES Daily twice a day.  And this is not a little newsletter.  Each issue is the large format size of AdAge or another industry pub and nears 250 pages.  Clearly, information overload is the big danger at CES.

So this leads me to the bloggers.  Thank god for them.  Walking around the booths, taking photos, writing super fast blog posts, and twittering the event live … CES is being recorded and shared live with the world by the bloggers.  NBCU may have set up two broadcast studios, but the guy propped up against the wall typing with one hand and chomping on a slice of Sbarros pizza in the other has a mobile studio of his own.  I have been walking through the event carrying three cameras, two lenses, a flash, a laptop, and a bag full of cords to connect just about anywhere.  All for my blogging mission which is the same as anyone else here … to make sure what happens in these halls doesn’t stay here.

Tonight we’ll all have a chance to do it together.  The It Won’t Stay in Vegas Blogger Party is the hottest event for bloggers at CES and will be taking over the Atomic Testing Museum later tonight.  Intel is the title sponsor and we just confirmed that Virgin America (another client) will be giving away 80 free roundtrip tickets to anywhere they fly in the domestic US.  There are going to be lots of giveaways, plenty of other festivities and (of course) lots of people sharing everything happening there with the world in real time.  It may be the most real time live virtually blogged and twittered party ever.  Too bad there’s not Guiness World Record for that.  In any case, it will be fun to watch and report from.  Keep watching my Twitter updates embedded above to keep tabs on what’s happening throughout the day (and tonight as well) – or just add me to your list (Twitter ID – rohitbhargava).