It is a hot and humid Saturday evening in Woodbridge, CT. We were going to go camping this evening, but there are thunderstorms. Instead, I sit in my office and try to write my long overdue daily blog post. Last week was Personal Democracy Forum in New York and Journalism that Matters in Detroit. On Monday, Internet Week starts in New York City and America’s Future Now starts in Washington. This year, I’ll try to catch a few days of Internet Week and miss America’s Future Now.

I’ve been looking over the schedule for Internet Week and trying to decide which events to cover. Unlike other writers, I don’t have an editor or assignment desk to tell me what to cover. At times, I’ve asked my readers about their recommendations, so if there is anything in the Internet Week schedule that jumps out at you, let me know.

A while ago, I wrote about blogging inspirations, and I mentioned E.B.White. I’ve always enjoyed the way he combined the personal and the political in his essays. Another writer I’ve greatly admired for perhaps very similar reasons and very different reasons is Hunter S. Thompson. As I read through the Internet Week schedule, I felt a little Thompson coming over me, or perhaps a little J.D. Salinger.

One of the events for Internet Week is CM Summit, “Marketing in Real Time”. They’ve lined up some interesting speakers. Fifteen minutes for Dennis Crowley of Foursqaure, and another fifteen minutes for “The Buzz on Buzz” with Bradley Horowitz from Google.

Yet the big blocks of time are set aside for “a fireside chat between John Hayes, CMO for American Express, and John Battelle, CEO of Federated Media” and “A Conversation with Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., Chairman, The New York Times Company”. To balance out Sulzberger’s talk, on the second day they will have “A Conversation with Arianna Huffington, Co-founder & Editor-in-Chief, The Huffington Post”. One of the cocktail receptions will be sponsored by Facebook and the other by Adobe. What would Hunter S. Thompson have to say about the event, or perhaps Holden Caulfield?

It seems like a lot of Internet Week might benefit from some good Hunter S. Thompson style coverage. Perhaps the event that comes closest to the appropriate level of skepticism and irreverence is “Don't Believe the Hype Day” sponsored by Aquent.

On Tuesday, Dennis Crowley of Foursquare gets a full half hour with Adam Ostrow of Mashable at Mashable’s Media Summit. They also have Duncan Watts, Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! speaking for fifteen minutes. Another interesting session they have is with Alec Ross, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Senior Advisor for Innovation. They fill out a bit of the rest of the time with folks in entertainment and were only charging half what CMSummit was charging. Perhaps that is why they are sold out. Of course they are only one day, instead of CMSummit’s two days.

The big event on Wednesday is Digiday:Target. I’ve covered a lot of Digiday conferences and have put up posts on Digiday:Daily in the past. They run good conferences with interesting speakers and I look forward to Digiday:Target, especially since digital targeting has my attention for a bunch of other reasons.

Thursday, ThinkSocial and the Paley Center for Media, in conjunction with PepsiCo, are hosting a one day conference called The #Promise at Internet Week's HQ. This is a conference my literary guides could be incredibly cynical about. GE, Pepsi and Nokia talking about “making socially responsible commitments”. Is it too late for BP to try and get a spot on the agenda?

That said, I have friends working at GE and I know there are some good people that really do want to make a difference through helping corporations be more responsible. Likewise, I really like my Nokia N900 phone and was pleased to read about their Bicycle Charger Kit, which they recently introduced in Kenya. Likewise, I am glad to hear that according to Greenpeace, Nokia is currently the greenest electronics manufacturer.

The rain has come now. It is cooling off outside. I’ve been spending too much time reviewing the schedule and trying to put together this blog post. So, I’ll post it without reading it over as closely as I do other posts. Hopefully, I’ll have more energy tomorrow. In the meantime, if you’re going to Internet Week, or simply have read the schedule, and have thoughts about different sessions, please let me know.