Conferences, VCing, Hot Topics This Morning

I start up Jeff Jarvis' comments about the inadequacies of the conference model .Now, I used to be a conference schmuck. Er, planner. And I'm involved with Dylan has photo and info here on those). You don't just rent these at your local Best Buy. Not to mention about promotion. Even at Mix we've already spent quite a bit of money on that. Ads in Wired Magazine aren't free. Getting an audience is tough work and doesn't happen by accident. If you make money at conferences it's really rare. At Fawcette the conference business did make a bit of money over the years and when that happened it subsidized other things like magazine editorial (without a magazine Fawcette would probably have never sold out a conference in the first place). Now, onto editorial. Even at Mix we're trying to put into play a lot of the things Dave Winer pioneered with the BloggerCons. But, holding a conversation with 200 people in a University setting is a whole lot different than holding a conversation with 2,000 people in a Las Vegas conference venue. It's not going to be easy to get audience participation and that's even if everyone brings a laptop and joins in the various chat rooms and blog networks that we put into play. Regarding content, I don't like panel discussions either. They always sound better when you're planning a conference than they actually turn out. Why? Because it's hard to pitch a real idea out to the audience and really chew on it for a while. I watched Gary Flake give a talk to search champs. He setup the idea, pitched the idea, then explained it in the course of an hour. It was wonderful. But, if we had a panel on "live labs" it would have sucked. Why? Cause getting five people to work on an idea just wouldn't have worked. Panels can be entertaining, though, if you have something where people disagree about. Then you might be entertained and you might learn something. Might. Anyway, back to the point. What we need to do is figure out how to keep event size at about 400 people. If we do that, then we'll be able to keep the economics at a great level per person. ++++++++++++ Back to VC'ing. Scobleizer blog. He works as Scobleizer