Comments on: Conferences: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly aspects

By: Arvind

Arvind — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 07:53:21 +0000

Interesting. I wonder if there is a case to be made for a “collaborative filtering for events/conferences” app. A combination of CF and leveraging the social graph would seem most useful.

Although in reality success or failure is probably going to be determined by much more mundane things. I would say that learning about new conferences is a problem that most people don’t know they have, because they don’t know what they’re missing. Always hard to make a dent in this kind of space.

By: Arvind

Arvind — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 07:44:45 +0000

That’s a good point — from the conference organizer’s point of view, there isn’t much to be gained by trying to reach out to the rest of the wide world to get an extra 5% turnout.

By: Jodi Schneider

Jodi Schneider — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 22:15:29 +0000

I tend to learn about interesting conferences from the people I follow on twitter.

This usually happens while they’re AT the conferences, rather than beforehand, but it’s useful for annual events.

@Pete – I agree with what you say about organizers and technology – and with the overwhelm factor, as a recent organizer. There’s also an 80-20 effect: additional time promoting the conference to non-traditional audiences may not (seem to?) have a big impact, unless there’s a great need for new or varied audiences.

By: Pete Warden

Pete Warden — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 15:42:42 +0000

I have exactly the same problem with conferences. Over the years I’ve taken a few stabs at solving the problem myself, including ‘Event Connector’, a Facebook app that helped you find conferences that your friends were attending, and helping out the late lamented startup EventVue.

A big part of the problem is that organizers are surprisingly conservative in their use of technology. They’re the only effective distribution channel for innovations, and they’re usually too overwhelmed by the traditional problems of putting on an event to spend much time on innovation. I think this is short-sighted, but hopefully some of the more progressive folks will figure out how to let people know about their conferences through social media, and have enough success to drive the industry to some standard system for discovering events.