Windows on the Web: What a Difference 13 Years Makes

By Bruce Kratofil
NABE Webmaster

The advance of technology over the past decade has been stunning.  A clear example of this progress can be seen in the way in which NABE has used the web to cover its annual meetings. While nabe.com first came online in 1996, it wasn’t until the 1997 Annual Meeting in New Orleans that NABE was able to provide live updates during the meeting.  Contrast the coverage of that 1997 meeting with the most recent annual meeting in St. Louis, and you'll see that we have come a long way since 1997. 

1997 NABE Annual Meeting - New Orleans, LA

I remember flying to New Orleans armed with two Earthlink local access numbers, and a phone cord to connect my laptop to the outside world. That meeting was held in the Fairmont Hotel in New Orleans, and it was the first time I began to formulate my First Law of Hotels: the speed of a hotel’s telecommunications system is inversely proportional to the Old World Grandeur of its hotel lobby. Old hotels generally had creaky old phone lines, which meant slow connection speeds.

I can’t remember if the Fairmont had one of those “ultra-modern” phones, the kind with the extra phone jack on the side that meant you didn’t have to crawl under the desk to plug in your computer. But I remember running up to the room at various times, dialing up at blazing speeds of 26 K or so, and uploading the NABE Outlook so that Web -enabled NABE members could download it right away, instead of waiting for it to arrive in the mail the next week.

That was the pattern over the years—to update the website meant a trip up to the room (a lengthy trip the time I had a room on the 32nd floor of the Marriott Copley Square) for a connection. It was not until 2003 or 2004 that high-speed Internet in the room became commonplace, that is about the time I started travelling with Ethernet cable, as opposed to telephone cords. The 2004 Washington Policy Conference at the Capital Hilton was supposed to be the first NABE meeting in a hotel with wireless. But the WiFi was so weak that at every break I would run down to the Cosi coffee shop on the corner to update the website.

Last year's annual meeting at the JW Marriott in Washington had WiFi, but the signal only reached certain places outside of the meeting rooms, which were three levels underground.  If you were in a session, the WiFi would not reach you. Blackberry users did had coverage, so they were able to keep up to date with the daily carnage in financial markets during that meeting.

2009 NABE Annual Meeting - St. Louis, MO

This year’s Annual Meeting at the Hyatt Regency Riverfront in St. Louis was a dream come true, as far as connectivity was concerned. Not only was fast WiFi present in every  guest room, but it was also available in the meeting rooms as well. For the first time ever, I could update and upload presentations while sitting in the sessions and listening to the speakers. This is commonplace at high-tech conventions, but the first time it was possible at a NABE meeting.

In addition to keeping the website updated, NABE also took advantage of social media tools Facebook and Twitter to blast out news updates and links to coverage at the meetings. On Twitter, the hashtag #amnabe was used to label news about the meeting. Many other Twitter users at the meeting adopted that tag, too, so it was easy to call up everyone’s tweets during the meeting.

Some of the tweets were entered directly (NABE is "@business_econ" on Twitter) and others were entered by linking our fan page at Facebook to the Twitter account.  The link meant that anytime an updated was posted to the NABE fan page on Facebook, the message was automatically posted to the Twitter account, too. While you can certainly do more on a webpage, there is a certain speed advantage to using social media, along with the fact that updates automatically get pushed out to your followers and fans.

By the way, NABE now has 273 fans on Facebook, this includes both NABE members and non-members. NABE's presence is a little smaller on Twitter, with only 102 followers, but the NABE reach was magnified there, however, because many followers re-tweeted our posts (re-tweeting means copying one of our messages and sending it out on your own account.)

To find out more about using social media, you can see the August issue (link) and February issue from this year, and October 2008. (There’s also a December 2007 article, but two years old equates 14 Web years old, so it’s already out of date.)

And Finally…

There are plenty of economics blogs. One way of differentiating yourself is to come up with a catchy title for your blog and website. Jodi Beggs has figured that out with the site Economists Do It With Models.

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