Every day, my Outlook inbox fills up with invitations to attend a variety of webinars. Here is a recent two-day sampling of topics covered by these online events: disaster recovery, workload automation, deduplication, aligning ITSM strategies, improving security, monitoring user activity, customer identity protection and IT automation. Who has the time?

Why am I so blessed to receive so many invitations, perhaps 10 to 15 every day? Simply because I am subscribed to several technology magazines, a situation I suspect is similar for a large percentage of Communications News' audience. There are a lot of technology-related magazines out there, as most of you know. Some, like this one, cover a myriad of topics important to IT management, and others focus on vertical segments, such as security or telephony.

Every time you sign up for one of these magazines, however, you also are signing up to receive e-mail invitations to attend Web seminars or virtual trade shows.
(Note: Communications News does not conduct webinars, so we don't pester our subscribers with e-mails to attend.) And you don't just receive one such invitation per event; they keep coming until you sign up to attend and even more after the event has been held.

Why are they pushing you so hard to sign up for these events? First of all, these are commercial ventures, with sponsors signed on and participating in the presentations. These sponsors generally are guaranteed a certain number of attendees, so the publications keep bombarding their subscribers with e-mail promotions until enough people sign up. The sponsors receive the list of all attendees and generally follow up with calls or e-mails to sell their products or services to what are considered interested buyers.

I have participated in several such Web events, including one virtual trade show. My experiences, however, have been less than satisfactory. The webinars I have sampled lacked useful, hands-on information, often being more infomercial than educational. Even the stated interactive benefit of these is suspect, as you can pose questions to the presenters, but there is no guarantee an answer will be given. The process is kind of like sending a query into a dark room and hoping a voice responds with a useful answer.

Not all of these online events are the same, of course. I've only sampled a few. The ones I'm now ignoring in my inbox might be worthwhile, or they could still be a waste of time. I'll never know, because now these messages have become spam. Delete.

kanderberg@comnews.com