Intentional Design Inc.

Content Convergence and Integration 2008 post mortem

It’s the weekend after what turned out to be a wildly successful content Convergence and Integration 2008 conference. My measure of success was that by the time that delegates left the conference, their brains hurt. In other words, I didn’t want them to go away saying they’d found only a session or two or three that were interesting; I wanted them to be standing outside the session rooms agonizing over which session to attend because they wish they could attend both sessions. Well, that happened. Not only that, but at the end of the last session, when I managed to spend a few minutes chatting with Michael Priestley, a speaker and acknowledged DITA king, he spontaneously declared that he played hooky during the last session because his brain hurt. Bonus!

Delegates are starting to rate the sessions on the conference site, and speakers have been uploading their presentations to SlideShare. During the conference, various folks blogged about the sessions on the site itself, and conference mentions being posted else are being aggregated on the Gossip tab. This sort of content convergence, made possible by social media, was a bit of a steep learning curve for a few of the participants, but more than one person initiated their blogging experience during the conference. Todd O’Neill confided that he thought his presentation on managing user-generated media might have fallen flat. Boris Mann, social media geek (and I say that in the nicest of ways), sitting in the audience, tweeted Todd during his presentation, which flashed Todd’s last statement on the screen. No reaction from the audience. I’m hoping that by the end of the conference, people were more comfortable with some of the social media applications out there. And speaking of social networks, more tomorrow …