With 4 billion existing unique web pages and 2.7 million new pages added daily, how to you find the best ones? As keeper of one of the meeting industry’s largest online favorites files (www.corbinball.com/tips.list.corbinslist.htm), I am constantly on the prowl for useful sites worth bookmarking.

This article reflects my annual choices for the top 100+ web site favorites for meeting professionals, cataloged by subject and evenly divided between meeting planning and general reference sites.

Selection criteria

The sites selected tend to be comprehensive, content-rich sites that provide unique tools or information. Here are the guidelines on how I made my decisions:

65%	Content	Strong content can make up for a lot of other faults. Good information is the bottom line! Content in king!
20%	Usability	A site should be cleanly designed with good navigation. It should load quickly and be easy to get information from.
15%	Style	A consistent, attractive theme and design make the site more usable, and therefore the content easier to use.

Pet Peeves

There are a few things that will almost automatically ban a site from my list:

Music	A site that plays music when opening the home page tops my list of pet peeves. Not only does it slow the loading time, it assaults the visitors’ senses. We have our own music preferences, thank you, and they almost never are the ones that the web site plays.
Interstitial Ads	Interstitial ads are those annoying pop-up windows that automatically open when you go to a site. I would rather spend my time getting information rather than closing these distracting and unnecessary windows.
Extreme slowness	If the home page does not open in 20 to 25 seconds with reasonable phone connection, forget it. This especially applies to splash pages (those graphic-intensive opening pages that some sites use) before you can even get to the real home page.
User-hostile password protection	If a site won’t let you see at least a portion of what it has to offer before requiring personal information, or if the site does not let you choose and change both your user name and password in the restricted area, I move on. There are plenty of good sites that are not unnecessarily restrictive or user-hostile. Don’t “strip-search” the customer just to allow them in the front door.

My Top 50 Meeting Industry Web Sites

MPoint represents a full site redesign from last year’s PlanSoft site. The new progressive step search function is easier to use. With 26,000 meeting facilities and 30,000 supplier contacts, this remains the deepest database of meeting facility information on the web. Check out the “meetings management” tab taking you to the PlanSoft site (www.plansoft.com) allowing planners to track meeting data and spending across and entire company or association. Throw away your stacks of meeting facility brochures.

EventSource is also a large, complete and very useful database of meeting facilities and suppliers. It is especially strong in non-traditional venues. Also, some city information is quite complete. This was the first site to offer online auctions for meeting space. New products include their meetings consolidation tool called Compass.

StarCite has potential as an industry portal. A spin-off from McGettigan Partners, this site has been built around strong meeting management for Fortune 1000 clients. Many innovative meeting planning tools are provided including meeting auctions, cancelled meeting space management, budgeting, and many checklists.

MeetingBroker comes from Newmarket International, the makers of Delphi and Breeze, two widely used hotel and CVB sales management. MeetingBroker collects RFPs from a variety of RFP sites (StarCite, Hot Dates, and others), translates them, and deposits these leads directly into the existing sales management programs that the hotels are already using. This is a great example of how the web can streamline a previously paper-based means of doing business.

Planning an event in Asia-Pacific? EventClicks offers an extensive listing of venues by country and other tools.

Developed in Europe, this site is one of the most complete hotel and meeting facility finders around, especially for non-US destinations.

Formerly AllMeetings.com and purchased by Saber BTS, this site offer a range of very innovative tools. For select clients, a real-time group reservation systems is offered allowing planners to book sleeping rooms, space and catering in one stop. I am disappointed to see the free planning tools eliminated from the AllMeetings site in the conversion to GetThere, but I expect more interesting ideas from this innovated and well-funded company.

Registration, Meeting Management and Housing

8. www.seeuthere.com This product and the next few represent the third generation of online registration service providers. In addition to providing user-defined, customizable online registration services for even very complex meetings, there are many e-marketing, communication, survey and customer profiling tools that represent a major communication advance for meeting professionals. SeeUThere provides a comprehensive marketing campaign management service using multiple media (e-mail, fax, mail); surveys; automated communications/reminders; audience segmentation and profiling and much more.

Cvent provides many of the features listed above. They are especially strong in the area of personalized communication automation and data collection with instant reporting and data analysis.

RegWeb is a product of Cardinal Communications, a true pioneer on the Web for meeting planners. They offer elegant template-driven online registration, housing, and communication automation services with real-time online reporting. RegWeb was recently chosen as the registration provider for StarCite meeting management products.

B-there’s ERS (Event Registration System) is an internet-based, real-time housing, transportation, event registration and reservation system. B-there was the first to integrate event registration, housing, air and more into a web-based system. They have recently announced an alliance with PlanSoft to provide registration for PlanSoft’s meeting management products.

Event411 was the “Official Online Event-Planning Provider of the Democratic National Convention 2000.” They provide a very comprehensive tool set including registration, meeting management, housing, reporting and e-marketing. Included are attendee communications, master agenda tracking, RSVP tracking, and a step-by-step "to do” list. Planners can build their own event home page, have the ability to track event-related expenses, create a personal schedule for the entire event, and can use the site for payment processing, desktop printing, video streaming, travel, and other tools.

Passkey provides one of the best web-based group-housing services, pulling from real-time inventory. More than 30 convention visitor bureaus have signed on, more than 2,000 hotels are “Passkey-enabled” in use for events in every major convention city in the country.

123SignUp is also a template-driven online registration service, but is specifically designed for associations and member organizations with member enrollment and renew features tied in.

Associations

Association Central offers an extensive searchable directory of nearly every U.S. based and many international associations with address, phone numbers and other contact information included. Hopefully, in the next update, they will include web site links.

The American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) has had a significant presence on the web for years. This site is especially good for association statistics, public policy information, association news, and its searchable database of association suppliers.

This reorganized and much improved site has tons of information at Meeting Professionals International’s (MPI) site. It has an active public job board, many articles, statistics, and industry news.

The Professional Conference Management Association’s (PCMA) cleanly designed site has lots of facts and figures regarding the meetings industry as well as many tools (checklists, sample contracts, a job bank and information on meetings technology). The Members Only section offers a substantial improvement in functionality and features. I hope they soon discontinue the annoying interstitial pop-up ad, however.

This cleanly designed directory and association site for the International Association of Conference Centers lists nearly 300 IACC approved conference centers around the world. It is chock-full of ideas and features including member directories, job boards, news features, surveys and more. The simplified navigation structure is especially good.

Need a speaker? The National Speakers Association (NSA) site has nearly 5,000 professional speakers in a searchable database, with tips on how to hire them. Also, SpeakersDirect (www.speakersdirect.com) provides another complete database of speakers.

This is the best site around for statistics about the economic impact of the tour and travel industries. Many excellent tourism and government affairs links are included.

Portal and News

Meeting News is my first stop for hottest news on the industry. There is also a very helpful online version of the “Meeting Planner’s Handbook” – a great collection of checklists and ideas. The site redesign of this past year added a very useful archive of past issues going back to 1997.

The Meeting Industry Mall was one of the first meetings industry web sites. It still is a great source for links to the industry. Click out the MIMList, a free email discussion group moderated by the passionate and eloquent Joan Eisenstodt, one of the industry’s leading educators and advocates. The Job Board also receives lots of activity.

Although not very attractively displayed, this site offers loads of hospitality links from the University of Nevada Las Vegas Hotel, Tourism and Hospitality Management School.

This is the place to go to sign up for Doug Fox’s free e-zine, distributed twice weekly, focusing on meetings and tradeshow marketing, web sites and technology. The site contains this year’s archive of his issues. Doug’s newsletter is a must for those interested in theses subjects.

Event security should be a concern to all meeting professionals. This site contains articles and a sign-up for a free, weekly newsletter keeping you posted to the security hot spots around the world and related issues.

PlanNet, a full-service site selection and meeting planning firm, provides a site with more than a thousand links to hotels and other industry suppliers under the “resources” section. This site is a great example of how one can use good content to drive customers to a commercial site.

When researching venues, people tend to focus on cities. This is why CVB sites tend to be some of the most popular sites for meeting planners. BizBash focuses on one city – New York (with expansion plans for more) with resources and news for special event planning, branding and business entertaining. Links to more than 5,000 products, services and venues are included. Check out the several fun and creative features including the Event Bloopers and Blunders file and the Visual Search Photo Directory.

Permit me to mention my site containing the most extensive listing of meetings technology sites on the web, free meeting planning software tools, dozens of articles on meeting planning and meetings technology and more.

CVBs

This site is the International Association of Convention and Visitor Bureau’s searchable directory of over 1,000 official tourism organizations around the world.

This creative consortium of 21 New England CVBs (convention and visitors bureaus) is an excellent model of regional web-based promotion that I would love to see on a larger scale. I especially like the StarDates section where hotels posts short term space availability.

Hotels

Although not specifically meeting industry oriented, the is one of the most extensive listings of hotels and motels around the world with more that 60,000 listings.

The Turnberry Isle Resort is an excellent example of what hotels should include on a site for meeting planners. If you follow the “meetings” link, you find a complete meeting planners kit, including menus, AV info, floor plans, billing procedures, and more. Everything that a hotel would normally mail out in their meeting planner’s kit at significant expense is included here.

This Walt Disney Swan-Dolphin hotel site is full of features. The 360° Photography Tours provides numerous views of meeting space, lobbies and more. Multi-lingual streaming video tours are provided, and a great way of handling individual floor plans. This is the perfect meeting industry “mass customization” site. If you follow the P.E.R.K (Personalized Electronic Response Kit) link, and fill out the profile form, you will be sent a specialized password that provides an individually customized site for you, greeting you by the your name and the name of your company on numerous pages.

Extensive link lists to hotels (more than 230 chains), airlines from 60 countries, and the world’s major airports can be found at this site.

This site employs streaming video and audio technology to take “virtual” video tours of more than 230 properties around the world.

Exhibition Management

BlueDot has consistently developed creative and innovated web-based exhibition and meeting management tools. Everything from exhibit hall kiosks/messaging systems to full-featured exhibition and seminar management systems can be found with some searching. This principal focus of the site, however, recently changed to event marketing providing enterprise-wide tools for managing tradeshows, road shows, conferences and exhibits.

GES pioneered using the web for exhibition services. Their online Exhibitor Kit has been available for more than five years. They have since developed a wide range of tools including online floor plans, virtual exhibits, and details about nearly every type of decorator, drayage, and other exhibition services you can think of.

TSCentral has one of best searchable calendars for Trade Shows on the Web. Other features include: venue searches (using EventSource as the data engine), web casting (events directory and services), and an extensive selection of exposition management products.

a2zShow is a web-based application helping associations and independent show organizers market and manage their live trade shows and conferences. This nicely designed site has an excellent demo, worksheets, tips, and case studies. This company is also moving to wireless for exposition management.

Tradeshow Multimedia, Inc has been providing interactive products to the tradeshow and conference industry since 1984. This site is especially good at providing screen shots to demonstrate their wide range of products.

This site is one of the best examples of providing a web-based representation of a trade show with graphic depictions of floor plans, meeting space, news rooms, and virtual booths. The eFloorPlanner EventManager allows meeting planners and tradeshow organizers to manage and sell booth space for a real-life event.

Need a video conference room? GVCNet provides a directory of 1257 public videoconferencing facilities in addition to lots of communication, streaming media, and distance learning links.

Virtual meetings and web-based meetings offer new ways of meeting and communication with attendees receiving slides, video, text and even video at their desktop in real time or on demand. This site includes man features included polling, program sharing, and interactive whiteboards. Up to 5 people can meet for free -- larger groups are at cost.

PlaceWare is one of the other major players in the web conferencing area. This product does an especially good job of audience polling.

SeminarSource provides on demand web casting specifically targeted to the meetings and association industries. Their SeminarCast™ CE Package includes a web cast and a corresponding MS PowerPoint presentation. Members can access online versions of continuing education sessions and take the required tests and evaluations without leaving their home or office.

Eloquent provides “web-based rich media” allowing visitors to simultaneously see video of a speaker or trainer, hear the audio track, see their high-resolution slides, and read the transcript of what is being said, all on demand on the web. This operates on using a free downloadable browser plug-in that even allows you to increase the presentation speed without the speaker's pitch rising like the "chipmunks" cartoon character. That’s a feature I would like to see for some of the live presentations around.

Meetings Technology

This site is one of the best for providing online surveys. The basic free service will allow you, within minutes, to create, send, collect and tabulate online surveys in a user friendly and easy-to-respond-to manner. The subscription version adds several features, but the free service works great.

This site offers an insight to what wireless palm devices will bring to the meeting arena. Currently only available in Europe, these palm-sized networking unit allows users to scan a room, and find out who is standing within a 1-3 meter radius and an 3-7 meter radius via a list of names on a hand-held screen. Selecting a name will produce a digital image of the person, their company, title and other contact information.

EventCentric takes the Palm PDA to the full extent of its capability with an amazing broad range of meeting tasks including messaging, lead retrieval, wireless registration, calendaring, daily show news, interactive exhibit floor plans, product directories, and more.

Travel and Location Information

This site tracks all US airline flights currently in the air and tells the location, altitude, speed, type of aircraft, ETA, and much more. Click on the “graphics” version to see a map with a little jet icon going over the terrain. Many other travel resources are also provided.

I book almost all of my air travel online. This process, however, can be a hit-and-miss process. What I used to do is to check the major ticket sites -- Travelocity (www.travelocity.com); Expedia (www.expedia.com) and others -- to assure that that I was getting the best rates and connections. Now, with QIXO, much of that double-checking is eliminated. Qixo is a meta-search site for airline fares. You enter the basic info (when you wish to depart/return, etc.) and it checks the top ten airline ticketing sites, and brings back the rates and fares in a nicely collated manner. If you do any online airline booking, this site should be the first stop. As similar site is: www.itasoftware.com

Airsafe.com provides a huge set of links and articles for the “air warrior” including flying tips, safety, baggage, accident listings, and more.

The Complete Carry-On Traveler is the most comprehensive guide on the web how to travel light, what to take, how to pack it with hundreds of related travel links.

The large and extensive site provides helpful travel information and maps for destinations worldwide.

This site has lots of helpful information for international travel including state department travel warnings, consular information, links to foreign embassies, visa/passport information, with many travel tips and links.

20,000 categorized, searchable and reliable restaurant reviews can be found at this well organized site.

This site catalogues online web cameras around the world. For example, you are wondering what the weather is in London. See for yourself with real-time photos from up to 51 camera locations.

I almost never drive to a new address in a metro area without using Mapblast. This site accurately maps nearly any address in the U.S. and can be printed out in excellent detail. The other major player is MapQuest (www.mapquest.com).

If you are driving, this site provides accurate, turn-by-turn driving instructions with estimated timing, between any two points in the U.S.

What time is it in Timbuktu or anywhere else? This handy site provides a world map with the current times listed in all of the times zones.

This site is the standard for checking the world’s weather. I refer to it every time I travel. A nice new feature is the “Averages and Records” provide extensive climate history for nearly any location you can think of.

If you are traveling (or meeting planning) internationally, this site has the national holidays for over 250 countries, religious calendars and more.

Currency Converter

This is my favorite currency converter. Easy to use with the rates updated by the minute.

Language and Translators

Have you received an email in a foreign language? The “Translate” tool found under “Search Tools” near the top of the page will translate to and from English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese. It translates text or even web sites. The program is not perfect but gives a pretty good idea of what has been written.

This site provides basic words, numbers, shopping/dining terms, directions, places, time and dates in 74 languages in an easy-to-use format. You can even listen to the words and phrases with streaming audio.

People and Business Finders

This site is both helpful and scary. You can search the phone books of the US by name or by telephone number (listed numbers only). It provides name, phone, and address information and even draws a map to the house! You can reverse search by telephone number or even by street name.

This meta-search site is designed for finding addresses, businesses, and people. For example, if you are looking for a business, type in the name once, and it allows you to quickly search all of the many of the major yellow pages sites without re-entering the information.

This site provides comprehensive data and statistics on all of the companies listed in the New York Stock exchange and more. Eliminate the cold calls by doing research on the company before you ever pick up the phone.

Reference

71. Simply one of the best and extensive search engines on the net with more than 1.3 billion pages catalogued. Also, check out http://groups.google.com/googlegroups/deja_announcement.html, the interim archive of Usenet newsgroups and other popular forums on the Internet with more than 40,000 special interest groups included.

Encyclopedia Britannica has their entire encyclopedia online for free. Extremely well researched and documented information can be found on nearly every subject.

This site provides software allowing users to ALT-Click on any word in a Windows environment (a word processing document, a spread sheet, browser, etc.). This opens a small pop-up window with a definition, thesaurus, and translation for the word clicked on. If the word is a place it shows a map, description, and current weather information. If the word is a company, stock quotes, company bullet, and current company news are shown. This is especially useful for those with “always on” internet connections.

Hundreds of reference subjects and links from A to Z are linked here. There are 23 links in the “A” section alone including: Airline Toll-free Numbers, Ancestry Genealogy Library, Area Code lookup, ATM locators, and Atomic Clocks.

This site allows you to download free software that assists in searching the web for information. It works like a meta-search engine (it checks and collates results from multiple search engines), but it is configurable, allowing searches to be saved, and has specialized search categories.

Another very extensive list of reference sites on nearly any topic you can think of.

The most complete and easy-to-use measurement converter that I have found. If you want to know how many feet are in a league, or how many carats are in a gram, this is the place to go.

Everything you ever wanted to know about setting up a web-based distance learning program with an excellent self-guided tour of the various options.

Surfing the web using a telephone? This free voice-based web service will allow you to search for restaurants, movies, stock quotes, news, sports scores, airlines, wakeup calls and more using your voice and phone as the browsing mechanism. The eerily accurate voice recognition program is a look into the future of how we will commonly interact with computers.

Need a quote for any occasion? Thousands of quotes catalogued by hundreds of topics searchable by author, subject, and keywords can be found at this free site.

This is one of the best and most complete sites on the Web for legal information. Thousand of categorized articles can be found on nearly any legal issue you can think of.

This site is among the best for finding information about elected officials, legislation, and how to become involved to effect change in the legislative system.

Are you looking for graphics to spice up a presentation, or a letter to a friend, or other reason? Ditto.com has a vast searchable graphic databases. Searches by nearly any item or topic will yield dozens of clip-art pictures and photos. Of course, be careful of copyright restrictions for proper use.

Although this article is directed primarily for business and professional applications, the International Movie Database site is too good to leave out. It is simply the best compendium of movie and film information on the Web. Wonderfully searchable, with excellent cross-reference features and local movie listings, this is a great example of an imminently useful and informative site.

Shipping

This shipping site compares all of the major shippers (USPS, FedEx, UPS, Emery, Airborne, DHL and more) both nationally and internationally. Enter the weight and where the package/letter is to be sent. This site ranks them all, and finds the best deal. The site also contains tracking links, drop off info, and much more.

The U.S. Postal Service also has a helpful mailing/shipping site for U.S.-based surfers with many tools including Zip+4 lookup, stamp ordering, postal rate calculator, and online stamps. It even has on-line bill paying options demonstrating how the web is forcing even the postal service to reinvent itself.

News

This is one of the best sources of news links on the web including directories of hundreds of newspapers, television stations, magazines, and other news resources around the world.

This is a very complete site for information and links about viruses and virus hoaxes.

This long web address can also be found going to www.about.com and searching on Urban Legends. This is the most comprehensive database of web and virus hoaxes I have found. If someone sends you a message asking you to forward it to everyone in your address book, 99% of the time it is a hoax or chain letter. Never forward such messages without checking for validity or your credibility is on the line.

Test your web site here. Enter your web address and analyze your site construction, speed, browser compatibility, load time and more.

The key to finding things on the web is understanding how search engines work. This site provides the most complete information on how to search and how to increase your web site rankings.

If it has anything to do with the Web, computers, technology, or software, you can find it at Ziff Davis mega tech site. One of my favorites sections here is AnchorDesk column.

Wilson Internet Marking provides hundreds of free articles that cover nearly any subject you can think of regarding marketing on the Web.

Not only is this where you go to register your domain (i.e. meetingnews.com), this site has a very helpful tool called WHOIS (www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois) allowing you to find contact information and other details about any web site. The database is searchable by company name, contact name and more.

Alexa for Internet Explorer is a free Web navigation service. It works with your browser to provide essential information about each web site you visit including contact information, link popularity and more.

Do you wonder what people are interested in as they search the Web? This site provides real-time search terms as they are entered into MetaCrawler, one of the top search engines around.

The best encyclopedia for technology terms on the web. If you want know the difference between a bit and a byte, or a virus, worm and Trojan horse, this is the place to come.

A great collection of links and web tools to analyze your web site, to search more effectively and to market on the web.

Privacy and Security

Can anyone crawl into your computer while you're connected to the Internet? You may be surprised to find out. I tested what I thought was my secure computer at this site, and site “welcomed” me by my name and details about my hard drive. Fortunately, it gives you step-by-step directions on how to correct Internet security problems. It will also check for any spyware programs (secret programs on your hard drive that may report your actions to others). This site is a must for any DSL or Cable modem subscribers.

Zone lab provides a safe, easy-to-install, and effective firewall protecting your computer from being hacked into over the net. It is free for personal use. This site is must for any DSL or Cable modem subscribers not currently using firewalls.

Anonymizer allows site visitors to browse the web anonymously and send totally anonymous email to others – useful, for example, in a whistle-blowing setting. It also has lots of information about privacy issues.