This was a different kind of blogging conference. Attendees were predominantly communicators there to learn about blogging and social networking technologies.
Congrats to Elizabeth and team for putting on such a great event. It delivered on two fronts. First, plenty of networking time with great people like Stowe, Heath Row of FastCompany, Tom Formenski, Anita Campbell, Rennee (I will have a nickname for you soon!) and Evelyn Rodriguez.
Second, the education bias of the event was well placed. I attended a few of the workshops on the first day. Guillaume has plenty of links to commentary and content.
My keynote opened the second day. My one big disclosure/caveat is that I’m technically employed by Sun but winding down my work there, and I hold Sun stock. So, that should partly explain my enthusiasm for the company. Ok, so I'm completely paranoid about disclosure and ethics these days....
Second caveat is that this is what I remember as much as I can remember. (Stowe made me drink too much - HE MADE ME!). Seriously though, it's interesting watching folks blog on the event (which is much, much harder than it looks - you need to be able to triple task, type at light-speed, report and absorb - and stay sane) - folks hear different things, see different things, write different things than you thought you said, said, or intended to say. Tip for Communicators: don't blog your own events - hire a pro to do it, or give bloggers passes and access.
Since I'm technically not a Flak for the moment I disregarded all the communications counsel I've been giving people for decades and produced 87 slides. It was awesome - at least for me. It also meant I needed to pick-up to a Ferarri-like pace at the back-end of the preso. Tip for communicators: do as you preach. No more than 20 slides for any preso.
I opened with the EPIC 2014 webisode. I first encountered this at Pegasus News. Thanks to Ian Kennedy who pointed out this was originally created by Robin Sloan. So full attribution, congratulation etc. to Robin. People raved about it. Blogs are wonderfully self correcting in this respect.
I’m going to post longer notes in the next few days along with some of the scrapbook of stuff I assembled when researching the keynote. Active Voice has a good overview. Tom has a nice wrap-up on the workshop delivered by Alice Marshall on "How to Pitch Bloggers". Neville Hobson has tons of other links and highlights.
I'll update more over the weekend. Thanks again for all the kind comments, thoughts, delicately delivered corrections.