Coolio - I get visited by Joel Spolsky and he leaves a comment
Here’s the evidence that Joel was here.
Cool - welcome Joel to the conversation. Let’s make sure that my motivations and reasons for bitching at O’Reilly are clear. I’m an entreprenuer. I start and build software products and standards and have been successful in the past. We pay for some of these efforts ourselves, out of our own pockets and I try and help as many causes as possible.
Presenting at O’Reilly Etech - or anywhere else for that matter - is about the open standards, products and ideas that we’re developing and mainly GIVING away to our industry. I work very hard to play matchmaker and make these dreams come true. So when I’m denied stage time or when a price tag is put on that stage time - I take it personally. Sorry if that offends you or anyone else.
It shouldn’t. You should see it as a zealous, inspired individual trying to make his dream come true - of an open and meshed distributed free web 2.0. 3.0 and 4.0 for that matter.
It’s about open source infrastructure - exactly the stuff that Etech is supposed to be about. I give overflow panels on the subject at other conferences - also run by O’Reilly - so this whole thing is really weird.
And then to find out they’re selling slots - just adds insult to injury. I’d love to go see your panel or presentation at Etech - Joel - and I really think folks need to be clear on what’s being paid for, and what was handed out.
That’s why I don’t go to Demo or BlogOn. They’re officially bought and paid for conferences. I do don’t do that shit.
I dig scenes like mashup camp or Gnomedex or SXSW.
February 16th, 2006 at 2:59 pm
[…] Marc Canter explains why it’s so awful that leading tech conferences sell speaking slots. How to put this. Marc is a business guy, but he also puts himself out there, in ways that most of us can’t even conceive of ourselves. I’ve known him for a long time, and I know he means what he says in this piece. You know it’s okay to make money, really, I’m not just saying that. I like to make money myself, and a good portion of my time is spent trying to make money, and sometimes I actually do. So I’m not preaching purity, and I don’t begrudge the conference promoters their profit. They run commercial conferences, they’re supposed to make money. But like Marc, I feel pain when I see all those people come together to find out what’s new, and see that the most important stuff, the stuff that requires the most cooperation, the stuff that I’m totally sure these guys are all going to be basing their businesses on next year and the year after, isn’t there at all. They just don’t include it. I forgot that I used to beg Tim O’Reilly to let me present at his Open Source Convention about RSS and XML-RPC and SOAP. He wouldn’t let us use his stage. Now I do have a problem with that. He’s perfectly happy to reap the rewards, but he doesn’t want to make the investment. Same thing as the VCs. Kevin Werbach is the same. They put their paying customers in as keynoters and panelists, guys from Sun, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, eBay, Amazon; and the innovations taht really matter just aren’t there. See, that doesn’t make sense to me. Squeezing out the new technology for commercial messages is over-the-top greed. Like I said, no problem with making money, but you have to invest alongside us to profit from our work. Whether you like me or Marc personally (and some people don’t like either of us) doesn’t matter. We both have track records that really entitle us to have access to the people who go to these conferences. That’s where they’re screwing up. […]
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March 27th, 2006 at 10:36 am
SXSW is becoming more and more corporatized though.
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