Comments on: Will Nerd Conferences Survive?

By: Smells like Singularity at Aral Balkan

Smells like Singularity at Aral Balkan — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:08:59 +0000

[...] Brooks Andrus from Techsmith, whom I always end up having a lovely conversation with whenever I’m at a geek conference, wrote about the Singularity web conference a few months back in response to a post by Seth Godin titled The new standard for meetings and conferences. (Brooks, I hope you don’t mind that I stole your excellent graphic for the post.) [...]

By: Aral Balkan

Aral Balkan — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:54:40 +0000

Hey Brooks,

How the heck did I miss this post when you first wrote it? :) Thanks for the props for Singularity.

I just have to clarify that Singularity is not an online conference, it’s a _global_ conference. The big difference here is that we have local conference hubs around the world, some being organized by venue sponsors like Yahoo! and the BBC and others — community hubs — being organized by community groups. People meet up _locally_ as part of a global event.

We definitely use the Internet but it’s our communication medium. It’s what ties all the local groups together. Sure there will be people experiencing and interacting with the conference from the comfort of their own rooms — and some speakers will even be presenting from whichever hotel room they happen to be at the moment — but we are concentrating heavily on having a good speaker and audience presence at the various local hubs. I feel this is essential to the character of the conference.

I truly feel that we are traversing some uncharted terrain here, building the first Conference 2.0, as it were. And I hope that other conferences follow suit because the type of conference we’re creating is environmentally friendly.

Brooks, by the way, expect an email from me very soon. I want to talk to you guys about getting you involved with the conference :)

By: Tom Ortega

Tom Ortega — Tue, 20 May 2008 20:22:14 +0000

@Keith I agree with you here. Seth is not saying go online, but rather speakers and conference organizers have to raise the bar in the conference realm.

I’ll be bold enough to say that we at 360Conferences are already executing this new standard and have been for the past year. Read my response and case over here:
http://360conferences.com/blog/2008/05/new-standard-of-conferenceswe-started.html

By: Brooks

Brooks — Mon, 19 May 2008 21:28:03 +0000

@Kieth – Sure I think Seth essentially says “you better bring it…and make it interactive” in order to make it worth the time and expense of the trip.

Don’t get me wrong, I think we web nerds underestimate the power / impact of face to face a lot. I also think Aral needs to prove he can make an online conference compelling.

I definitely see online conferences posing a serious threat to physical ones which is why conference organizers and speakers need to “raise the bar” as you put it.

…my only goal really was to make light of my passion for 6th St.;-)

By: Keith Peters

Keith Peters — Mon, 19 May 2008 21:13:54 +0000

Well, if you read the whole article, Seth is talking more about raising the bar for speakers, not advocating switching over to all web conferences. As cool as Singularity may be (I’m a speaker), it’s not like I’m sitting here tingling waiting for it to happen. But when I think about flying over to Flash on the Beach this September, for example, I do get pretty psyched.