Having been to a wide range of conferences this year (from SXSW to Lift, Re:publica and Ersatz yesterday) i agree wholeheartedly with Russell Davies:
Remember when conferences were in the basements of hotels and featured lime cordial and mint imperials? And you had to go because they were the only way to get new knowledge from people who knew stuff but were three years away from finishing their book. The internet’s killed them.
Now you can read everything you need to know almost before you need to know it.
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So conferences are turning into something else, finding new reasons to exist. The Interesting model is one way to go – cheap, easy, informal, low-risk. Or there’s the TED way; flashy, significant, expensive, you-had-to-be-there.
There’s absolutely no reason for bashing either model — they are completely different in nature, and we need both. I tend to like the intimate settings a lot more than the all-encompassing megalomanic gatherings, but having said that, SXSW was the best conference I’ve ever attended.
The only problem is that at SXSW you’ll have three-four sessions at the same time, so you have to choose carefully. They could overcome this by making it smaller, and then we reached the beginning of this argument again.