Four months ago, I wrote that Plannerwire was going quiet and might someday find a new role.
Apparently “someday” meant August.
Plannerwire is back, but we’re not rebuilding the old blog. We’re keeping the curiosity, opinions and practical event experience—and getting much more deliberate about what deserves to be written.
Four months ago, I wrote a post explaining that Plannerwire was going quiet.
That went well.
In April, I said Plannerwire would remain online mostly as an archive while I put more energy into Event Tech Atlas, producing events, working on event technology, and all of the other things that tend to fill the calendar when your actual job involves meetings and events.
I also left myself a little escape hatch.
I wrote that there was always a chance Plannerwire might “find a new role down the road.”
Apparently the road was about four months long.
And here we are.
The funny thing is, I don't think the decision in April was wrong.
I think I just misunderstood the job Plannerwire still had to do.
Going through the old site was an experience
As part of rebuilding Plannerwire, I recently went digging through the old WordPress archive.
There is a lot in there.
Nearly two decades of posts about meeting planning, event technology, hotels, tradeshows, destinations, sustainability, event marketing, AV, social media, video, attendee experience, useful software and whatever else seemed interesting at the time.
There are posts about Iceland as a meeting destination.
There are posts about tradeshow costs.
There are posts about making ugly hotel ballrooms slightly less ugly.
There are posts explaining how hotels should use Twitter.
That one now feels less like content strategy and more like digital archaeology.
But at the time, it mattered.
That's the thing about writing about technology for almost twenty years. Eventually, some of your cutting-edge observations become museum exhibits.
And honestly, I kind of love that.
Some of those old posts hold up surprisingly well.
Some absolutely do not.
Some contain ideas I would still stand behind today.
Others make me want to grab my 2010 self by the shoulders and say, “Keith, maybe don't hit publish quite yet.”
That's what an archive should look like.
It represents a moment.
What struck me most, though, was that Plannerwire was never really just an event technology blog.
It wandered.
A lot.
If something affected meetings and events and seemed worth talking about, we talked about it.
Sometimes that meant technology.
Sometimes it meant why exhibitors were paying ridiculous amounts of money for a wastebasket.
Sometimes it meant green meetings.
Sometimes it meant event design, hotels, service, marketing or some new online tool that everyone was trying to figure out.
The connecting thread wasn't a specific category.
It was curiosity about how events actually work.
That part is worth keeping.
So no, we're not restoring the old Plannerwire
When we started talking about bringing the site back, one obvious option was to simply move the archive over.
Hundreds and hundreds of old posts.
Import them.
Clean them up.
Fix the images.
Update a few dates.
Maybe slap “Updated for 2026” on the promising ones and congratulate ourselves on having an enormous content library.
Nope.
I don't want to do that.
Old content isn't automatically valuable because there's a lot of it.
And event technology ages particularly badly.
If Plannerwire wrote about conference Wi-Fi fifteen years ago and the question still matters, the answer isn't to change a few paragraphs and put 2026 in the headline.
The answer is to research conference Wi-Fi in 2026 and write the article meeting professionals need now.
That doesn't mean the archive disappears.
Quite the opposite.
There are great ideas buried in there.
There are questions worth revisiting.
There are topics where it might be fascinating to compare what we thought then with what we know now.
And there are probably a few posts worth preserving purely because somebody needs to remember there was once a time when telling a hotel to open a Twitter account qualified as cutting-edge event marketing advice.
But the new Plannerwire doesn't need an enormous archive to prove it has history.
The history is there.
We can move forward.
Event Tech Atlas didn't replace Plannerwire
When I wrote that April post, Event Tech Atlas seemed like the natural evolution of what I had been doing here.
And in some ways it is.
The Atlas helps planners and event professionals discover and understand event technology.
It maps the ecosystem.
It helps answer questions such as:
What platforms exist?
What do they do?
Where do they fit?
How do they compare?
That is an important job.
But I have realized Plannerwire has a different one.
Plannerwire is where we can ask:
Does this technology actually solve anything?
Or:
What happens when you try to use it onsite?
Or:
Why does this contract work this way?
Or:
Why does the hotel say I can bring my own AV company and then suddenly the Wi-Fi costs $30,000?
The Atlas can map the technology industry.
Plannerwire can poke at it.
It can investigate.
It can explain.
It can occasionally get annoyed.
There is room for both.
Why come back now?
Because I haven't stopped doing the things Plannerwire was always about.
I'm still producing meetings.
I'm still sitting at tech tables.
I'm still dealing with AV proposals, speaker presentations, registration systems, hotel contracts, internet requirements, event apps, onsite problems and the phrase “just one quick change” shortly before doors open.
I'm working with associations and corporations that are trying to figure out what technology they actually need.
I'm evaluating software.
I'm building software.
I'm experimenting with AI and figuring out where it is genuinely useful versus where somebody simply added the letters A and I to a product page and doubled the enthusiasm in the press release.
I'm seeing things work.
I'm seeing things fail.
And I am still constantly running into questions where I think:
Someone should explain this properly.
That is Plannerwire's job.
The new Plannerwire is more focused, but not narrow
We're not going to cover everything happening in meetings and events.
There are plenty of good publications doing industry news.
We don't need to rewrite every press release announcing that Company X has appointed a new vice president of something.
Everyone will survive.
Instead, Plannerwire is going to spend its time where experience, research and a practical point of view can actually add something.
Event technology
Yes, event tech will still be a major part of Plannerwire.
But I am less interested in listing features than asking whether the technology actually solves the problem.
Who needs it?
Who operates it?
What does it have to integrate with?
How much work does it create?
What happens when it fails?
And the question that probably gets ignored most often:
Will the staff actually use it?
There is an impressive amount of software in the world capable of doing seventeen things nobody asked for while making the one thing you need surprisingly difficult.
We can talk about that.
AV and production
Meeting planners are expected to understand an astonishing amount about AV despite very few people ever sitting them down and explaining it.
Internet.
Microphones.
Projection.
LED.
Streaming.
Recording.
Rigging.
Power.
Labor.
Speaker laptops.
Confidence monitors.
Production schedules.
You don't need to become an engineer.
But you should understand enough to know what you're buying, what questions to ask and when something doesn't smell right.
That's going to be a major part of what we do.
Event operations
This is the unglamorous stuff that determines whether an event actually works.
Run of show.
Speaker information.
Files.
Deadlines.
Room readiness.
Staffing.
Registration workflows.
Communications.
Deliverables.
The spreadsheet called FINAL_v7_REALLYFINAL.xlsx that three people are editing fifteen minutes before rehearsal.
This is the part of the industry I find increasingly interesting because so much of the pain isn't caused by some giant strategic problem.
It's caused by everyday workflows that are harder than they need to be.
The business of events
This one is becoming particularly interesting to me.
Who owns the companies we use?
Why are contracts structured the way they are?
Where does the money go?
How do commissions work?
What does private equity ownership mean?
Why are certain services tied together?
Why does an industry practice everybody complains about continue year after year?
Our recent look at Encore's proposed IPO is exactly the kind of article I want Plannerwire doing more often.
Not “Encore filed for an IPO.”
You can get that headline anywhere.
The interesting question is:
What does Encore's SEC filing tell meeting planners about the economics of in-house AV?
That's the difference.
Software we wish existed
This is the other big change.
For years, event professionals have complained about software.
I certainly have.
Sometimes with justification.
Sometimes because software apparently enjoys making simple tasks require twelve clicks.
But at some point, complaining gets boring.
So we're also building things.
Small things.
Focused tools for real event problems.
Not a 900-feature enterprise platform designed to manage every theoretical event workflow known to humanity.
If a planner needs a simple way to manage a run of show, collect speaker information, help guests find their table, schedule crew or track signage, maybe the answer doesn't need to be an enormous platform implementation.
Maybe it can just be a good little tool.
The editorial side and software side of Plannerwire should feed each other naturally.
Working events exposes problems.
Writing about events exposes problems.
Sometimes the answer is an article.
Sometimes it is software.
Sometimes it is both.
And yes, we are going to talk about AI
Of course we are.
It would be fairly strange to write about technology in 2026 and pretend AI wasn't happening.
But Plannerwire is not becoming an AI hype machine.
I don't particularly care whether something is “AI-powered.”
I care whether it helps.
Can it save an event team time?
Can a normal person use it?
What information does it need?
What happens when it confidently gets something wrong?
Does it make an existing workflow easier?
Does it create three new problems while solving one?
Those are useful questions.
“AI will revolutionize events” is not a useful answer.
What isn't changing
I don't want the new Plannerwire to become so polished that it stops sounding like Plannerwire.
There should still be opinions.
There should still be curiosity.
There should still be the occasional rabbit hole.
There should still be humor.
If something seems ridiculous, we should be allowed to point out that it seems ridiculous.
The expertise should come from doing the work, asking good questions and understanding where things go wrong—not from repeatedly reminding everyone how expert we are.
The old Plannerwire was willing to try things.
I want to keep that.
What is changing
We're going to be more deliberate.
Fewer throwaway posts.
More research.
Better sourcing.
More primary documents.
More technical verification.
More distinction between what I think, what I have experienced and what the facts actually support.
Technology changes too quickly to confidently repeat something that was true three years ago.
If we're writing about software, we'll check the current software.
If we're writing about pricing, we'll check the current pricing.
If we're writing about a standard, we'll check the standard.
If we're writing about an industry practice, we'll try to understand why it exists before complaining about it.
Opinions are still welcome.
They should just know what they're arguing with.
And we're not publishing something simply because Tuesday arrived and the content calendar has an empty box.
The content machine will survive without us.
So what is Plannerwire for now?
I think the old Plannerwire was essentially asking:
What's interesting or useful in meetings and events right now?
That's still a pretty good question.
The new version just sharpens it:
What does an event professional actually need to understand about this?
That's where I want to spend our time.
Sometimes the answer will be a 3,000-word investigation.
Sometimes it will be 800 words explaining how many wireless microphones you actually need for a panel.
Sometimes we'll look at an SEC filing.
Sometimes we'll look at a piece of software.
Sometimes we'll explain why the thing that sounds simple becomes considerably less simple once 1,200 attendees walk through the door.
And every once in a while, we'll probably wander somewhere unexpected.
That part is staying too.
Plannerwire is back.
Not to recreate 2010.
Not to restore an archive just because we can.
Not to become another generic event-industry news site.
It's back because there are useful questions to answer, assumptions worth challenging, technology worth understanding and a whole bunch of event workflows that still make life harder than they need to be.
That seems like enough to keep us busy.