As of Wednesday, one week after opening the 2009 conference to enrollment, we had 57 people registered for the conference. We were already over 1/5th sold out four days ago.
Most of the people registered are what we call Citizen Bloggers – those who work full time outside the wine industry and are blogging at home home in their spare time. This is great, because this is really for whom the conference was originally created.
In 2009 we will also focus on wineries that have or are planning blogs. This conference is perfect for them and this coming week I’ll make an effort to get the word out to Vintners Associations around the country.
I can tell you that last year the non-blogger industry folks signed up late and swelled the ranks during the final months. I think in part that is because we focus our pre-conference emails on bloggers, not on those in the wine industry. Still, once word gets around I expect the industry folks to sign up sooner this year since we are limited to 250 participants and no one wants to be on the unfulfilled wait list, as happened last year.