By day three of the conference I pretty much had my fill of database analytics, email marketing and that god awful, overused cliché "Web 2.0".  But as my luck would have had it, I had the opportunity to dine with Jeanniey Mullen, Executive Director, Worldwide Email Marketing for Ogilvy One and Scott Delea, President of Adverb Media.  Some how during the course of our meal I got talked into attending a Thought Leadership series hosted by the two and Ian Baer of iCrossing at 4:15 PM.  Keep in mind at 4:15 PM on day three the only thing I knew I would care about is getting the hell out of Chicago.  But in the spirit of keeping my professional posture I gladly accepted the invitation. 

In truth, I'm glad I attended the series.  All participants gave really good insight into the evolution of direct marketing on the web and how there will eventually be a "convergence" of message mediums.  When I prompted Scott Delea to give a good example of a successful RSS strategy he was able to shed some light on the fact that RSS is rapidly being transformed into widgets and that simple text RSS was the beginning of the widget phenomenon.  An interesting perspective that I didn't previously consider.  Jeanniey extended our debate from the previous night as to whether social networking sites such as MySpace and FaceBook will become the new inbox providers since global email is used to prompt the user to the changes made to their own or their friend's accounts.  This is something I definitely agree with and will probably blog about it at a later date.

Kudos to all.  It was a good series.