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Saturday:

Caught part of a talk by Daniel Gilbert about happiness and marketing, a panel on services like dodgeball, meetup and upcoming that are merging offline and online life and a panel on starting your own consulting/for hire business. Most interestingly, Meetup’s charges its fees because it allows people wanting to meet up to find a suitable venue.

Sunday:

Maps panel which was ok, Rev Dan Catt of Yahoo was the most interesting. Lots of talk on map/photo integration and cell phone stuff. Jason Kottke and Heather Armstrong gave a keynote on pro blogging which was ok.

Adam Greenfield’s talk on ubiquitous computing was very cool. He included current examples, near-term possibilities and coming problems. He closed with five guidelines for the implementation of ubiquitous computing.

We didn’t win an award, losing out to 9rules in our category and eminem for people’s choice.

Monday:

I learned that microformats are pretty cool, especially when there’s tools that can extract them and turn them into alternate formats like Technorati’s hCard to vCard and hCalendar to ics converters. I’ll probably add microformats to Rubyholic after the next release of ZenTest.

Craig Newmark of Craigslist gave an awesome keynote. He spoke about how people are pretty much the same all over judging by the content of the dating and casual encounters sections. The main thing Craigslist has been doing is getting out of the way and letting the users evolve the site.

The panel on viral marketing was minorly applicable, the most important question raised was how do you measure effectiveness? Typically, viral marketing is so cheap that it doesn’t matter. They won my best conference quote award, “Puppets are the next monkeys”.

The “What People Are Really Doing on the Web” panel featured too much unreadable powerpoint. There were some pretty graphs from which I derived that soccer moms like playing web games.

Tuesday:

Only saw the keynote by Burnie Burns of Rooster Teeth fine producers of Red vs Blue. They talked about how to build buzz around your podcast/website/etc. and gave crazy predictions for the future of the internet now that the phone companies are getting grumpy about the internet traffic crossing their networks.

Burnie Burns wins second-best conference quote by stating that Google’s mission statement is probably something like “Let’s not make eggs”.