After barely sleeping through the night with a slight hangover, I made it to the next day of sessions on Friday. The first session of the day focused on gaining access to the players, coaches & league of your choice. All of the guys on the panel were pro baseball bloggers and the people in the audience were either football or basketball. So in addition to being the only lady in the room I was also the only NASCAR blogger too. I asked a question towards the end of the session and sort of talked about my own experiences with getting access to NASCAR.

This kind of opened things up and from that I met Tyler Bleszinski co-founder of the SB Nation, who also writes the Athletics Nation blog (Go A’s!), and Matt Cerrone of MetsBlog.com. I went to lunch with them and had a great time explaining how I got into NASCAR and getting advice on how I could improve my site.

Mark Cuban gave the final keynote speech of the convention and his opinion on ads really kinda made me think. He thinks that you should do without them, or at least not be so heavy handed with them. He pointed out that his blog has no advertising on it whatsoever, but then again he doesn’t really need to have advertisers because he has more money than like Jesus. But still his talk was interesting and I appreciated his straightforward honest approach.

I cannot say enough about how wonderful everyone was — I knew that this convention was something that I had to do and I think all of this will get me even closer to my goal for next year.

On this trip I realized a few small things…

  • Nothing is cheap in Las Vegas
  • Room service is always the way to go — even if it does cost an arm and a leg — especially for breakfast
  • People are stupid when lining up to get on Southwest Airlines flights — how hard is it to line up next your number?? Elementary school kids do this on a daily basis.
  • Airport retail vendors need to catch up with the rest of the world and not make you sign for your check card purchases. Airports shoulda been the first ones on that whole if it’s under $20 you don’t need to sign the receipt thing. I’m just sayin’… I’ve got like fifty things I’m carrying and you want me to sign for a $4 latte??