1.) I have been playing FFXI since September, 2004. Just passed the 4 year mark in Sept 2008 a few months back. I have two jobs at the level cap , Paladin and Monk are both level 75. I also have many levels spread across other jobs, 8 of which are 37+(halfway mark, obviously) which does not include the already mentioned PLD and MNK.
2.) I live in Missouri. I am willing to travel out of state to events, but would prefer it be within driving range(maybe 1-2 day's trip).
3.) I would prefer a Live event be 2-5 days long. Having a 5 day event with repeating content could allow for multiple groups of tickets to be sold, so more people can attend! I would probably prefer it in the early spring months, because not many hotels will be pre-booked, to make it easier to find hotel listings. It would be nice to know of Fan Fests as much as 4 or 6 months in advance to help people book hotels for the area!
4.) I did not attend the Fan Festival 2008. I think it didn't stand out in my mind too much, because I wasn't there. However, there also wasn't a lot of new exciting information to learn, so that might be why it wasn't so exciting. I'm not saying I expect exciting new information at each Fan Fest, though. Perhaps it could have been more lively if there were more Q&A sessions, or if the developers would open up a little more and expand on answers to some questions. For example, when asked about a certain aspect of gameplay, if they can't answer thats fine, but it'd be nice to hear them discuss some ideas they have for changing things around in the future, or maybe the original thought process they had, behind a related gameplay aspect.
5.) Wups, kind of answered 5 in #4 there. I think it would be really cool if SE held more fan contests, either another video contest, or other fan art contests of some sort; held online for all but the final round- then offer to pay travel and hotel arrangements to the finalists so they can attend the fan fest for the final round! Or, skip the travel/hotel and have a better reward, like a tiered reward from the mog bonanza. Maybe a tier 2, or a tier 3 item, instead of the big grand prize 100mil or something.(that's kind of too big lol)
Email or PM is fine for notification. I think I'd prefer Email for record keeping purposes. =O