Category Archives: Events

Conferences, meetups, talks, and gatherings.

Open Source Business Conference

So there is an Open Source Business Conference happening in a few weeks a few blocks away from me and I just randomly came across the site. After SxSW, reading about OSBC is like being in another world: it’s $1500 to go, only two days long, the language on the site is sickeningly corporate, and I haven’t heard of a single person there. Then again, this is an “open source” conference with Microsoft as a platinum sponsor. A real Open Source conference would have no fees, everything would be web streamed, the line between speakers and attendees would be thin or non-existant, and the topics would not focus so much on money. Actually, it would be a bit like Bloggercon.

Panels Finished

My last panel was yesterday at 5 PM so now I’m taking as much time as I can to catch the panels that are left and learn a few things. Speaking was more stressful than I expected but most of the feedback was good. I still need to check out the web feedback though, as people are probably more candid online than when they’re shaking your hand.

SxSW Blogging Begins

Time to break out the old SxSW (South by Southwest) category again, as I depart in just a few short hours on my journey back to my home state of Texas and to Austin, a town which I love. This year is going to be very different for me than the last two because where before I was a naïve young boy sitting in the audience starstruck at all the amazing people there, and now I’m a naïve young boy sitting on a panel starstruck at all the amazing people there. So the seating arrangement has changed a little bit, but not much else. The only other difference is last year WordPress had maybe 2,000 users (tops) and now we have about 40x that.

I just got a new memory card for my camera and I’m all charged up to photoblog the entire event as I have years past, but I don’t know if this year if I can do 0-day photos as I did before, but I’ll try to catch up when I can. Even though all the cool kids will be using Flickr this year I’m going to put mine on my photolog because I don’t want to duplicate effort and use up my limited Flickr bandwidth. The tags should be fun to watch though.

Quick public service announcement: tunnel your traffic or use SSL, far too many people sniff the networks at these things.

I’m going to be on three panels this year, I’ve linked each from the sidebar and I’ll post more about each as they approach.

If you’re a Photo Matt reader or a Ping-O-Matic or WordPress evangelist and you see my please introduce yourself or say hi, I’d love to meet everyone there.