Hello, and happy holidays! I am done traveling for the year, and since I'll be home for the holidays, starting now, I look forward to blogging more and reconnecting with the folks out here.

My final speaking gig of the year was last week, where I was the emcee at Ragan’s Web Content Conference.

There were a ton of good sessions, but the highlight was probably, as it almost always is, Shel Holtz’s workshop on where the Internet is heading.

My great pal and mentor Shel did his usual terrific job of scaring the holy living hell out of everyone with a glimpse into a technology-heavy future—a future filled with Twitters and Tweets and Edge Content and widgets. A world where everyone has an online avatar, and that’s how you travel around the Internet. A world where nobody e-mails anyone anymore . . . if you want to reach someone, you go to their MySpace-like page (yes, everyone will have one) and leave a message there.

Shel is not a geek . . . but he does play one at conferences.

If there’s a online gadget, tool, or application Shel has it, uses it, or teaches it.

When I introduced him, as the keynote session on Day Two, he strode up to the microphone wearing an all-black shirt with a symbol on it that looked like the indicator on your computer that shows how powerful the wireless symbol is.

Then he reached into his pocket and flicked a switch. And the damn thing lit up.

But it wasn’t just a prop. It was an actual wireless indicator. I swear to God. As Shel moved around the hotel, he would gain and lose bars, just like the wireless icon on your computer.

Shel has always worn his love for technology on his sleeve, and now he’s wearing it on the front of his shirt as well.

Earlier in the conference, before Shel even got there, I had some fun with him.

Over the course of introducing the luncheon speaker, I let it slip that our Day Two keynote speaker, Shel Holtz, was a bit of a “bedwetter.”

Shel, of course, is not a bedwetter. He gets along with the bedwetters and propeller heads in IT, because he speaks their language. But he's not one himself.

I guess an apt way to say it would be: Shel is comfortable sitting on a urine-soaked bed with other IT people, but he would never wet the bed himself.

But here’s why I called him one anyway: I was introducing our lunch keynoter, who happens to be a monster among men, a real titan of the industry, a great mind, and a wonderful person. (See if you can figure out who I was introducing).

So I said: “Our Day Two keynoter, Shel Holtz, is also a great man, but next to our luncheon speaker, he is a hopeless bedwetter.”

Well . . . of course a bunch of snitches told Shel about what I said when he got there, so he opened his speech by saying: “Despite what Steve Crescenzo said, I am not a bedwetter.”

Then he turned his shirt on.

Thank God Shel’s not really a bedwetter. If I know Shel, he probably wears his little electric shirt to bed, so he can test the wireless as he’s Twittering and Tweeting himself to sleep . . . so if he were ever to actually wet the bed, he would probably fry important parts of himself.

And I'd like to see him explain that to his lovely wife, Michele. Michele is half Sicilian, half Jewish. She'd probably fry whatever parts the electric shirt missed.

The other highlight of the conference was a session by Gerry McGovern . . . but that’s worth a separate post, so I’ll tell you about him tomorrow.