Rogue Amoeba begins "Should I Exhibit At Macworld?" blogging series

Your comments: That is quite educational, I think. I keep some ideas around, but given 1) the costs and 2) the near total lack of media exposure, I'm not interested. If there really were 400 booths then even the dedicated Mac/Apple blogs didn't even cover 1% of the other companies that were exhibiting.

I'm not expecting that everything get covered, but getting scattered coverage of 10% of the best exhibitors would have been nice.I was
extremely disappointed in the coverage, it was iPhone/AppleTV to almost a total exclusion of everything else. As such, I think that even the blogger community had failed.

Did the booth cost recently go up? I felt that this year had a very poor showing from typical developers. The North Hall was like a ghost town. Typically this would be the spot for the smaller 3rd party software vendors and I always had fun there in the past as these are the guys that are the real Mac enthusiasts.

But this year they were in these "kiosk farms." Imagine a grouping of triangular columns with a shelf protruding from each side spaced maybe four feet from each other. From what Paul is saying, you get one of these shelves for $3k. I felt bad for these guys as it looked like they couldn't even carry on a conversation without someone bumping into them trying to get by to another vendor.

The only booths that hadn't shrunk this year were MicroSoft, Canon, Epson, Adobe, and Filemaker. Oh and of course Apple. Maybe splitting it off from the CES date will help but I'm in agreement with Paul. There needs to be more bang for the buck if they want to get exhibitors back.

At least there were less iPod cases.

$100 for cabs? take BART just for the geek/green value and it's $5 each way.

Given how the only surprise at the show has been the Keynote Speech, are expos still relevant?

I can understand the need for a convention like the auto shows but computer related ones? Hmmm...

This is a great thing for people to know just how much it costs. Something even harder to swallow is when you're on the show floor and a dozen of the 400 boots at Macworld only see a handful of people and the company is just sitting there twiddling their thumbs trying to sell server racks or bible software (those are the two companies I saw empty the entire time at this year's macworld)