SXSW Interactive

"The SXSW Interactive Festival features five days of exciting panel content and amazing parties. Attracting digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs, the event celebrates the best minds and the brightest personalities of emerging technology. Whether you are a hard-core geek, a dedicated content creator, a new media entrepreneur, or just someone who likes being around an extremely creative community, SXSW Interactive is for you!"

March 7th, 2008 - March 11th, 2008. Austin, Texas.

DocTrainUX

As a non-content specialist, I found this conference really enlightening. Especially thinking in terms of user experience. I learned a lot more detail during the workshops on structure, down to the word order in the sentence. It made me appreciate true content strategists and the art of good writing. I'm glad they highlighted the link between good content and good search engine rank too. All too often, people don't realize that engaging in one best practice often results in marked improvements across the board.

Slightly too commercial for my tastes, laden with sponsor booths during the lunches.

April 18th, 2007 - April 21st, 2007. Vancouver, British Columbia.

@Media

The first conference that I participated in, this was definitely a treat. As a one track conference, you don't have to worry about missing a speaker over another. The array of topics ranged from business goal analysis to javascript kung-fu and were thoroughly entertaining as well as informative. Tantek presented the microformats cheat sheet I made and it went over well, which is always nice. A lot of angst, formatting and folding went into that!

May 24th, 2007 - May 25th, 2007. San Francisco, California.

Massive Tech Show

The Massive Technology Show is a three-part event that provides a user friendly environment to explore technology for business. In this action packed day of interactive exhibits, informative presentations and networking opportunities, companies learn how to achieve their goals faster using technology.

March 28th, 2007. Vancouver, British Columbia.

Northern Voice

Having missed the Moose Camp, bar camp style presentations, on the first day due to training takeover staff in London, UK; I was still a little jet lagged for the full presentations on the second day. However, the overall journalistic enthusiasm that the speakers and participants imbued was contagious, so after a bit of tea and the amusing keynote, I was ready to absorb. A lot of academic topics were discussed such as blogging

February 23rd, 2007 - February 24th, 2007. Vancouver, British Columbia.

Web Directions North

Each session inspired a new project idea, each technology or improvement showcased, instigated thoughts of mashups and inter-site marketing. I first fully learned of microformats at this conference and since then I have been unable to stop avowing the virtues of semantic markup. I rebuilt this site using the principals as a test case. The energy and passion that the speakers conveyed renewed my obsession with the user experience. Also, the availability of discounted professional books was very impressive, as much so as the quality of the speakers. I look forward to the next chance to attend this conference.

February 6th, 2007 - February 10th, 2007. Vancouver, British Columbia.

Search Engine Strategies

An even mix of marketing and technical background to search engine marketing techniques, this conference pleased me greatly. It was great to have the opportunity to talk to the developers for the various browsers and get details about specific issues, like page size, in terms of ranking. The open discussion panel about white hat versus black hat tactics was enlightening and the panelists were very informed. Even going into the sessions with a fair amount of knowledge, I left having learned a great deal.

April 25th, 2006 - April 26th, 2006. Toronto, Ontario.