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News & Updates - Friday, June 24, 2005

Why Go To An Event If You Are Not Speaking?

We are grateful for the invitation to attend Kevin Werbach's Champaign Supernova conference this week, which was a nice event. There were interesting sessions on Internet video and a fun video summary of the collision between new and old media.

But we don't envy event planners these days. We could always force ourselves to go to events by reasoning that it was a good time-out for education. We could learn new buzzwords like The New Economy and The Long Tail before others. However, with this conference season, podcasting and event blogging have taken away our conference attending purpose. Why go to one event when you can track several online and get stuff done? Supernova, and others, have smartly made their events into solid stuff online, but by making events more easily accessible to the masses doesn't that also seem to make an event, less eventful?

Of course, another reason to attend conferences is to shmooze. It seems that the in-crowd who attends every event gains street cred, especially if they are on a panel. And if you are not invited to speak and are a perpetual audience member you probably lose street cred. As if to show those on-stage who has the power, conference audiences these days rarely bother to look at them. Rather, they remain intent on their laptops throughout, occasionally throwing rude questions up at the panelists. We imagine events will transform dramatically to deal with this new behavior, but how? Not everyone can be a speaker.

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