I ran into Rob Hyndman the other night, one of the organizers of Mesh, and he asked me how I felt Mesh went, no bs. I didn’t get a chance to answer him completely so here I am.

My take, Mesh was very well organized. As far as conferences go, this one was painless from the choice of location, to the layout, to lunch, etc. The only thing I missed was more details on the speakers, possibly adding small bio pieces to the conference pamphlet.

Content, the keynotes were great, some outstanding, the home run for me was Michael Geist. I’m biased, however, I think the StoryStream videos were a great addition as well.

Where things went a little off the rails for me was during the afternoon panels/workshops. I’m really not the best person to ask as I’m deep in technology not marketing. Anytime you put a technologist into a marketing focussed panel discussion you could be in trouble. While some of the discussions were interesting, most didn’t work for me. At times it just felt like sitting around discussing what other people may do in the coming year. We were gossiping. Will blogs be monetized, where’s web 2.0 heading, etc. The reason I know I’m not the target audience is because I’m sure that’s exactly what they’re supposed to be discussing in these sessions. Me, I’d rather build something than jabber about what someone else may build someday. I suppose that’s another reason I’m not in marketing.

Will I go to Mesh again? At this point yes.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 22nd, 2006 at 12:43 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.