I don’t know about you, but every time I go to a conference or trade show, after about an hour I’m getting a headache from overstimulation: Too much shiny stuff and bad lighting. Crowds. My face hurts from smiling at the poor booth people while they do their pitches. My feet hurt. And why is there never enough air? So when I had the chance to “attend” my first virtual conference a couple of weeks ago, I jumped at it.
One of the things I do is translation and, like all of the translators I know, I have a profile on ProZ.com. This year is the site’s 10th anniversary and, to celebrate, it held its first virtual conference on International Translation Day. It was free, and I signed up, even though I knew I wouldn’t get any free pens out of it. Read the rest of this entry »
Last month — courtesy of Nokia — I had the privilege of attending one of the most exciting conferences in the technology calendar, TEDGlobal 2009. Though TED is invitation-only — and monstrously expensive at $4,500 — it succeeds in bringing together an extraordinarily diverse range of speakers and delegates…plus, everyone gets a really, really cool gift bag!
The final session of the week-long conference opened with Daniel Pink, a former speechwriter for Al Gore, now a “career analyst” investigating and examining the changing patterns of work around the world.
Pink has been the subject of much attention lately, with his assertions that “right-brainers will rule this century,” as well as high-profile appearances at TED and a recent interview with Oprah Winfrey. These assertions offer some intriguing insights into “the future of work in a post-broadband world” — notably the patterns of work, business relationships, structures and skills that we’ll perhaps require in the future. Read the rest of this entry »
So, you’re back home from that conference, and all that is left to do is to relax and enjoy your swag, right? Maybe not. To make the most of your conference experience, your work should be just beginning when you unpack that suitcase.
If you made the most of your time at the conference, you made a lot of new contacts and expanded on old ones. When you get home, it is time to start carrying those relationships into the future. And when an event is fresh in your mind is also when you need to evaluate your experience to decide what worked and what didn’t about it.
There are four main follow-up tasks to complete after a conference to ensure that the benefits of the conference continue long after the event is done. Read the rest of this entry »
There was as much grumbling about the Twitter-style format of the 140 Character Conference in New York this week as there often is about 140-character limit in Twitter itself. Anything new or different can drive some people up the wall. Others, however, embrace the newness and the challenge of doing something completely different, and that is where the conference broke new ground, or at least it felt like that to many of us.
Jeff Pulver, the conference organizer, credits Twitter with everything that made the event happen, from the positive feedback that led him to set a date for the event, to obtaining the majority of commitments from speakers and panelists, to publicizing it almost entirely via tweets and retweets.
In my post “How Twitter is a Communications Game Changer,” I talked about the random but significant changes Twitter was causing in terms of the way we communicate and the tools we use. The 140conf — as it was called on Twitter — was the embodiment of a Twitterstream; it was Twitter in the flesh. Here are some of my observations from the conference: Read the rest of this entry »
It’s been said that the apps that break out at Austin’s South by Southwest festival are those that help festival-goers navigate and orient themselves within the sprawl of parties, panel sessions and gigs.
The 2007 edition of SXSW was Twitter’s big moment, the tipping point for the now iconic service. The following year, many thought that SCHED*, a web-based event calendar and agenda builder, would be the breakout service of 2008 — the “new Twitter.”
Though such expectations were inflated by the media, SCHED* provided useful personalized schedules that have endured through two editions of the festival. The latest edition of the app now includes mobile support, iPhone compatibility, and the ability to integrate with iCal and Google Calendar. Read the rest of this entry »
With the U.S. tech conference season – TED, ETech & SXSW – behind us, the European scene is starting to warm up for spring with the Futuresonic festival, Thinking Digital, Future of Web Design and, more immediately, Amsterdam’s The Next Web.
The Next Web is now in its fourth year and will open with a day of unconference events as a lead-in to two days of scheduled keynotes, startup demos, awards and an expo hall. Speakers include Google’s Bradley Horowitz, CSS expert Eric Meyer and Andrew Keen, author of “Cult of the Amateur”.
We’ve got a special 20 percent discount for WebWorkerDaily readers wishing to attend The Next Web. Simply register here to claim your discount.
Photo by Selena Marie
In previous posts, I’ve talked about attending local events and meetups or scheduling new ones if you can’t find any that meet your needs. In this post, I wanted to talk about something bigger than the typical meetup: community-organized events. BarCamps, unconferences, and similar events have been popping up all over the world in increasing frequency. I’m an organizer for the local BarCamp in Portland, and I have attended many of these types of events. I’m planning to attend BarCampAustin this weekend, which is running in parallel with SXSW.
The organization of these events is very different from typical commercial events. While commercial events tend to be organized by professional organizers who are being paid to produce the conference, community organized events are often organized by unpaid volunteers from the community who are passionate about the topic. Both types of events have their strengths and weaknesses and their place in the industry, but both are also very different in both organization and attendance.
Attendance
I have noticed that many organizers and a high percentage of attendees of BarCamps tend to be web workers. Read the rest of this entry »
Depending on who you ask, Second Life is either an early pioneer in what promises to be a brave new virtual world of peer-to-peer interaction, rife with business opportunities, or a non-starter that got way too much hype way too early and won’t live up to any of it, no matter how long we wait. I believe my fellow WWD writer Aliza Sherman is very much on the former side of the fence. I’ll only say that Second Life’s rise hasn’t been as meteoric as Twitter’s, for instance, but that I still see potential for it to grow.
Yesterday, a couple of new tools were announced that made me stop and reconsider how much of that potential is actually being capitalized upon, how soon the virtual world’s appeal might broaden, and what that might mean for working on the web. The services in question are a Virtual Conference Centre and Real Time Research, joint venture projects by Second Life development vets Rivers Run Red and consulting group Futuresource. Read the rest of this entry »
I don’t know about you, but every time I go to a conference or trade show, after about an hour I’m getting a headache from overstimulation: Too much shiny stuff and bad lighting. Crowds. My face hurts from smiling at the poor booth people while they do their pitches. My feet hurt. And why is there never enough air? So when I had the chance to “attend” my first virtual conference a couple of weeks ago, I jumped at it.
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
