1.23.2007

My Wish for Sticky Conferences

Here's my wish for 2007, vis the Web 2.0 universe we inherited from 2006. I would like, pretty please, a web site that allows data and metadata to be attached to conferences. An example will illustrate what I mean.

I just got back from the annual American Association of Colleges & Universities conference. As usual I made a slew of contacts, have sheafs of handouts and my own notes, the conference program annotated with the sessions I attended, etc. The sessions were good, and the best ones were those that involved extensive discussion during or afterwards. Roundtables are the best, actually. Unfortunately, those conversations tend to get cut off just when they get interesting. Wouldn't it be great if these moments could be tagged so that you could pick them up later? I imagine a site that you log in to, identify the conference, session particulars, etc., and then are allowed to add comments or documents under that rubric.

Some conferences attempt to do something like the above, but it would be better to have a central clearinghouse with a standard interface and a dedicated team making improvements. There would be gobs of advertising money to be made, I'd imagine, since the entropy of the groups addressed is low (people with common interest are interested in some of the same products and services).

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