NATPE has been around for over 40 years. It would be no surprise if they, like many of the people who have been in “the industry” for that long hadn’t changed much during the course of their existence. I'm happy to report that's not the case. The LATVFest, held in Los Angeles on the 8th and 9th of July, was my first NATPE experience. I was really enthused by what I saw. There was a great mix of fresh new talent and established industry people. A perfect storm for innovation to happen. From what I saw in the panels, the shift is happening. Industry professionals who have been anchored in traditional media are starting to recognize the Internet as a via platform for content creation, distribution and consumption.

I'm super-excited to be speaking at The Perfect Pitch conference with Tony Adam here in LA in October. Sir Richard Branson will be the keynote speaker. I'm a HUGE Branson fan, so that makes it doubly exciting for me.

Startups - you can submit your pitch for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to pitch your idea to Sir Richard Branson and a conference full of VCs!

Mark Story over at The Intersection tagged me in his most recent #blogmonday post, which means it's now my turn to start spreading the link love. Mark started blogmonday to help uncover some of the bloggosphere's "hidden gems."

I really enjoy exploring the web, when time permits, and finding sites that entertain, inform, educate and inspire me. I hope they'll do the same for you. And without further ado:

We Make money Not Art
This site continues to impress me, they are really on top of modern art, and the intersection of art, technology and society. They cover topics like sousveillance, ubiquitous computing, wearables, video art, installation pieces, activism, architecture, social media and design.

My good friend Cathy Brooks asked my “Power BFF” Nicole Jordan and me to be a guest on her internet radio show, Social Media Hour last week, have a listen if you've got a spare hour. The show was a great opportunity for me to start verbalizing some of the thoughts I’ve been having lately regarding communications strategies, or rather, in many cases, lack thereof.

Too often marketing is approached as an ad-hoc jumble of tactics tossed against the wall in the hopes that one or two pieces will stick. I don't think the current economic situation is helping, people are in panic mode, they want results yesterday and are in such a rush and under so much pressure that they altogether forgo careful planning and strategy development. This panic-induced full on tactical assault just leads to poor ROI at best, if not complete and total disaster.

Citizen journalism, open government, status updates, community building, information sharing, crowdsourcing, and the election of a President.

Editor's note: This is first guest post from Max Gladwell.

Our children will inherit a world profoundly changed by the combination of technology and humanity that is social media. They'll take for granted that their voices can be heard and that a social movement can be launched from their laptop. They'll take for granted that they are connected and interconnected with hundreds of millions of people at any given moment. And they'll take for granted that a black man is or was President of the United States.

KMC music hired Heavybag Media to help launch Dixon Drums, a new line in the U.S. Heavybag Media branded Dixon- including the logo, print catalog, website and even the badges on the Dixon drum kits. They're new to the market in the U.S but have already made a big splash among drummers. Dixon also was honored "Best in Show" at NAMM 2008. Truth be told, they're just regular people (musicians) who love making music and want to help drummers do what they do best!

I'd like to open up discussion based on a pair of symbiotic hypotheses: the recession prevented Bubble 2.0, AND there's the possibility that tech IPOs could potentially help to tame the financial crisis. One wouldn't be possible without the other. Here's the situation as I see it:

With NAMM taking place over the weekend and several of our clients in the musical instrument business, I thought it would be appropriate to evaluate the participation level in social media and web strategies of musical instrument companies. (Disclosure: a few of these companies are Heavybag Media clients, noted below.)

As part of this evaluation, we have set up a site bringing in RSS feeds from as many musical instrument related companies we could find at TheyAreTheMusicMakers.com (a reference to an Arthur O'Shaughnessy poem) using Sweetcron.

My first experience with Twiistup was as a sponsor at Twiistup 4. Twiistup does an amazing job of providing some serious opportunities for startups, investors, and the community inside of a serious party atmosphere. It's a chance for everyone to unwind and have fun; maybe it's the relaxed atmosphere that allows the conversation to flow so smoothly. When I approached Twiistup founder Mike Macadaan with the idea to bring a bed to Twiistup 4 in place of our sponsor table I wasn't sure what kind of reaction I'd get. I think it was an ear-to-ear grin.

I was inspired to continue the conversation that Chris Brogan started on his blog a couple of days ago. Chris' post begins:

"Pepsi doesn’t want to talk with a few hundred people at a time, do they? It’s just that all these businesses have built huge platforms, huge sales funnels, huge marketplaces, and I think what social software is setting us up for are cafe-shaped conversations."

Which is funny, because apparently Pepsi does want to talk to a few hundred people, including Chris Brogan. Why? Because Pepsi knows that cafe conversations are what is driving the social web. And they know that the conversations that Chris Brogan have are with larger groups of people, and that they tend to get repeated in other cafe's around the social web.