Well, the conference is over and as promised I will post up my experience on the event. In general, I went there mainly to try something new and to possibly meet new people. I attended the conference with a friend which made it easier to find things and it was more interesting this way as we were able to discuss about each of the events right after. For my friend he actually wanted to learn more about blogging and to gain some practical knowledge about the topic.
There were some interesting sessions that took place which offered an insightful view on how there seems to be a lot of people who are trying to use and promote blogs as a way to expand communication and interactivity in some ambitious ways such as schools having their students use blogs as a way to track one’s progression. The keynote speaker was done by Anil Dash who is one of the earlier bloggers as he started one back at around 1999 and the topic was mainly about is view on why blogs are important for the Internet as they help to promote communication and interactivity I guess you can say.
For myself the most interesting session was one that dealt with the legalities in blogging such as a company wanting to force you to take down posts that they feel are harmful to their image. Too bad it was on the more general side though where it was mostly law terminologies that were explained as I would have been more interested in hearing about cases along with the end results and how the decision came about.
Ironically, one of the sessions that generated some interesting comments and details was about love and online dating which I didn’t think I would learn much from aside from hearing about people’s love stories. Now obviously most of those dating sites make money off subscriptions. An interesting comment that came up was that a person who worked in the industry talked about how it is in the best interest of a matchmaking and dating site that you not find your perfect match as if you do they will lose revenue as you will no longer need their services. I guess that isn’t too shocking when you think about it, but it was interesting to hear it.
On an interesting business note one of the speakers was Markus Frind, who resides here in Vancouver, and happens to own and operate the popular dating site plentyoffish.com.
For those who don’t know, what he did different was that he made his site free for everyone to use and instead of relying on subscriptions to generate revenue he made money from displaying Google Adsense ads. This is kind of old, but for those who never seen it he posted this image of a cheque that he got from Google for the month of February 2006 as he earned over $900,000 Canadian:
if you want to journey into the world of web publishing, though I think most people have an account already. I guess it goes to show you that being different can be the key to success in many cases.
Overall, the conference was a very mixed bag in general as both my friend and myself agreed that it kind of felt lost many times where certain speakers didn’t seem to be very confident in presenting about a certain topic because public speaking didn’t seem to be something that they had a lot of experience in which got the best of them. Another thing we noticed was that while some of the speakers were knowledgeable about a certain subject compared to a lot of average people, it was not necessarily to the point where they were able to answer questions thoroughly/accurately. This at times caused some misinformation which was kind of a shame I thought such as a person saying that Google can’t index pictures from normal websites but rather only on blogs. The interesting comment my friend made was that this conference actually made him less confident/comfortable in publishing a blog as a new user as he felt many of the sessions at times got too technical for him. It can always be improved upon I guess.
Interesting experience nonetheless and I met a lot of new people who I will probably bump into again in the near future.