A Guide to Recognizing Your Attendees

Washington, D.C., is a prime-enough meeting destination that it doesn't seem at all unusual that The Washington Post would publish a handy infographic designed to help people, as the headline says, "Know your conventioneer." It's cute and tongue-in-cheek, but also contains large kernels of truth -- or, at least, the names of many eclectic, real-life organizations that meet here, such as the National Association of Church Business Administration, the International Dairy Foods Association, and BioMass 2011: New Horizons of Bioenergy. Walking around downtown, you never know if you're passing someone who's come in for a meeting -- a scientist or a teacher or a business executive or a chef or a government contractor or an artist or whomever. Or, maybe you do know if someone is conventioneering. "They travel in clusters," Events DC President and CEO Greg O'Dell tells the Post. "And their badges give them away."

Welcome, Beck/Stewart/Colbert Nation!

I've written before about the pluses and minuses of living in a premier meeting destination like Washington, D.C., but I'm having problems figuring out whether the trio of "populist outrage" style events coming here over the course of two months is a plus or a minus. Glenn Beck kicked it off with his Restoring Honor rally, held at the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, and Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are following up with their own "dueling" events on Oct. 30 -- Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity and Colbert's March to Keep Fear Alive.

Leaving politics completely out of the equation: It's pretty cool to live somewhere that's identified as a symbolically important place to convene, even if Stewart and Colbert are mostly riffing off Beck for as many laughs as they can get. The flip side is that, depending on who's holding a symbolically important rally here, there's a segment of the population elsewhere that equates D.C. with everything that's wrong with the country. You try not to take that personally, but sometimes it gets to you.