The New Unconference: ECs (ExperienceCons)

I've been to a lot of conferences and events. Last week I was at the Webmaster World Pubcon. What was remarkable about that? The pubcrawl. That's where the "pub" part of "PubCon" came from. Huh? What's even worse is that very little alcohol gets consumed on these things. Turns out the average drink order per attendee is about one beer. Every attendee I talked to said that it was the best part of that conference. And that conference is no loser. I attended several sessions and I learned a lot at each one. Things like this: Did you know that Google treats words connected by underscores, like_this, as one word? Google sees that as likethis. Matt Cutts of Google explained why that is (coders at Google needed ways to find variable names in their code). He recommended using hyphens, like-this, instead. Why? Cause the search engine treats those as separate words, like this. Now, why did that little tip matter? Well, he was looking at someone's code on stage. They were doing it the wrong way and it was hurting their standings in the search engine. It was the kind of tip that you only get if you go to Web Master style conferences with experts who know why things work one way, and not another, on stage. So, that's one kind of conference experience. The "expert on stage." But there's another few kinds. Dave Winer's BloggerCon was interesting because he not only had experts on stage that knew a topic well, but he got the audience involved in the session. That works when you have an audience that has experts in it too. Last week I also had dinner with Robots. Weird cars and how to weld, how to make a wind-powered generator, how to program computers, Make Magazine crowd had 10s of thousands of people come through their doors in two days. It was a watershed moment for me and I told both Del.icio.us") | Yahoo! My Web Technorati: Scobleizer blog. He works as Scobleizer