Dan recently blogged about his experience at IWMW this year, so I thought I'd share my experience of the event as someone who wasn't physically there, but was instead following the action remotely.
Being a conference for web folk, it should come as no surprise that it makes extensive use of technology as a way of amplifying the conference experience. The have been live video streams of the talks as far back as 2007, and "backchannel" discussion on Twitter before most people even knew what Twitter was.
On the first day of the event I fired up the live video stream with the aim of watching the opening session. But then the phone rang, and I missed most of that. And then I got called into a meeting. And then something on the website broke that needed fixing urgently. This was a common theme over the three days of the event - I was able to catch the odd bit of a session here and there, but didn't manage to watch anything all the way through.
In spite of the interruptions, I was dipping into the Twitter stream of posts tagged with #iwmw10 as often as I could, which was giving me a good idea of the key messages from each of the sessions, and how the physical audience were responding to them. As well as being streamed, videos of the talks have been made available to watch on-demand - now all I need is to find some time to actually watch them.
It's obviously not as good as being there in person - a lot of the benefit of being at a conference comes from the discussions that happen outside of the talks (and usually after a few drinks), and there's that pesky thing called the day job that keeps getting in the way. But in times when not everyone can afford to spend three days out of the office, it's not a bad substitute.
No comments:
Post a Comment