Realblogg.

RealShare Chicago (see yesterday's blog) wasn't the only commercial real estate to-do I attended this week. On Wednesday, I did a tour of booth duty at a convention called Realcomm, whose one saving grace was that it was held on Navy Pier, more about which later. In previous years, Realcomm has been held in Dallas in June (I never got to attend one before, however). The wisdom of that site might seem questionable, considering the likelihood of extreme temperatures in June, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. After all, the goal is to have people attend your show. Your nice, air-conditioned show. 100°+ F. (35+ C.) has a way of keeping you conventioneers off the golf courses.

Unless it doesn't. Las Vegas has plenty of golf courses, and they don't shut down from April to October. Golfers are a special breed of mad dogs in the midday (or is it noonday?) sun, as I think they would confess.

I digress. For whatever the reason, Realcomm was in Chicago this year. To put it briefly, it's a show for property managers, especially office building managers, with an emphasis on the technical aspects of it. During such a trade show, booth duty involves standing behind your company's booth, talking to whomever comes by and takes an interest in your product -- in my case, our magazines, and the company Web site.

Booth duty can have its charms. It really isn't that difficult, and occasionally someone interesting wanders by. The two or so hours I was at Realcomm, only a handful of people stopped at our booth, mainly because attendance at the show seemed fairly low. No one else from my company was around either, so I was pretty much left to my own devices.

I was able to take a close look at the convention program. The attending companies tended to be technically oriented, so I noticed certain patterns in their names. For instance, there were clearly a number of survivors from the late 1990s -- the age of pretentious let's-think-outside-the-capitalization-box names, e.g., iThinKthereForeiAM.com. (Not real, as far as I know, but if I'd had that idea in 1997, I could have gotten venture capital for it.)

Anyway, there were a fair sampling of bollixed capital-letter patterns on the program (these are real examples, at this show): a la mode inc. (ice cream for office workers?) and manageStar. I won't complain too loudly about these, since my own organization uses GlobeSt.com, but I'm glad that particular fad has run its course. At least I hope it has -- NB the example of the ridiculously named marchFIRST, which went bust in a big way here in Chicago a couple of years ago.

Also, there were cutesy-pie misspellings, such as Convergint Technologies; familiar-sounding word distortions, such as Xceligent; and the mandatory lower case i- prefix, in this case an outfit called iTendant Inc. And to think, these companies probably paid real money to consultants for these confections, which will be as dated as Liberty Cabbage in a very short time.

On the whole, the show was a bore, and that's saying something, since I'm difficult to bore. But when it was over, about 4:45, the saving grace kicked in. I got to walk the length of Navy Pier. For those unfamiliar with the pier, it juts into Lake Michigan from downtown Chicago a good quarter-mile or so. In the mid-90s, the City of Chicago fostered a redevelopment of the pier that transformed it from a seldom-visited, decaying relic, to the top tourist draw in the entire state of Illinois, featuring a large array of mostly family-friendly diversions, part outdoors, a good many indoors. Also, it has a relatively small amount of convention space (a gnat's worth, compared to the elephantine McCormick Place).

Occasionally, I miss the decaying relic, since it had some charm. I recall going there only twice in the late '80s, once to see a live broadcast of a live radio show WBEZ no longer produces, at the ballroom at the tip of the pier; and another time to see parts of the AIDS Quilt on display under the pier's enormous empty shed.

But on the whole, the redevelopment works well as a destination, and has interesting spots for most any temperament. This time I wandered through the Smith Stained Glass Museum, which is free, and seems to have been expanded considerably since the last time I visited last year. It has a remarkable collection of stained glass, all of it made in Chicago -- a major center of stained glass production from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th, it turns out.

It was a good way to take the edge off a dull show. Too many people would have jumped in a cab and been done with it.