Dave Winer posts a lot of insightful ideas about the future of conferences. My instincts are that a hybrid of approaches are what is required - a combination of common experiences (keynotes), structured communications (sessions), and adhocracy.

The closest I have seen come to this was the ApacheCon, which had a parallel hackathon running during most of the sessions. What the hackathon had was 802.11, power strips, tables, chairs, and a few whiteboards. In my experience, power strips are the most overlooked accessory by conference organizers.

I know many West Coasters that are just hitting their stride at midnight, so if you want to truly even the playing field, make the keynotes all happen at 7 a.m..  Las Vegas is also a great location in that nobody lives there, and everybody can get there easily. 

I'm not a fan of speakers during eating.  Eating is a wonderful opportunity to talk to the person next to you.  Rooms with PC's or Mac's are so last century, these days most people bring their own internet access devices.

  1:20:03 PM   Comment 

Jon Udell:  For me, C# was easier in one way and harder in another. It was easier because Visual Studio .NET made consumption of the WSDL APIs frictionless.  I'm curious as to why this isn't true for, say, Python.  There are existing libraries that purport to do this.  Is the issue awareness, license, deployment, functionality?

If there are issues, and interest expressed by Groove developers and/or users in collaboration on flattening them, then I would be willing to contribute.

  11:02:09 AM   Comment 

Chris Sells: Of Eggs and Omelets.  What is most notable about this to me is that I first saw the e-mails that he is referencing when I went looking for them after seeing the reference on his weblog.  

The reason is simple: my corporate email address is getting so overrun with spam that I instituted a rather aggressive filter a few weeks back: everything that did not originate from within the firewall is filed into a folder.  (Note: that doesn't mean a forged SMTP address either, it means that the particular e-mail never saw a gateway ever).

I scan this folder periodically, but as this folder has such a low signal to noise ratio, I often miss things.  Meanwhile, my aggregated news feeds have a much higher signal to noise ratio for me.

You want to catch my interest?  Say it on a weblog.

Update: Steven Noels has the right idea.

  10:06:02 AM   Comment