Just wrapped up two plus days at the Gnomedex conference in Seattle. For me, the conference was kind of a bust. I did meet some cool people and had a few interesting conversations, but at the end of the day I was asking myself “Why am I here?”.
Most of the sessions were either hijacked by high-profile bloggers, or were clique-ish discussions between the “in” crowd. Two years ago, Gnomedex was much more of a user conference, but as its grown and achieved a higher profile, it seems to have changed a lot.
I had some notes on all the sessions, but if you want to get some more complete coverage, check out Josh Bancroft’s excellent coverage and photos at tinyscreenfuls.com. At least it ended Saturday with a great presentation from Phil Torrone from MAKE magazine.
Man, that's the way I felt last year - it was great to meet people, but in the end the presentations were mostly the in crowed presenting to each other it seemed like. I'm sorry to hear it has moved more toward the cliqueish end of the scale. I thought about going this year, but just couldn't justify it.
I really want to find a blogger's conference that has some value, and won't gouge my eyeballs out for the fee...anybody know of one?
I agree - it's a shame that the amount of ego in the room was almost enough to suffocate all of us. I missed the normal everyday users, too.