I'm currently sitting in on the wrap-up panel here at @media 2006, so now is as good a time as any to give an overall impression of the conference:
- The panels and presentations were, on a whole, a little light. I knew coming in to this that the general target audience for the conference was a little lower-level than I would generally be interested in, but I was surprised by some of the presentations (the accessibility one, for instance, the Dave Shea typography presentation for another) and their lack of useful information. It's interesting hear Dave tell you which fonts he likes, but I'm not sure anything he presented helped us. (Everyone at the conference had heard of sIFR, so how does talking about it being available help anyone?)
- The Javascript Libraries session was interesting, if only to hear about all the different libraries people are using and hearing a panel talk about the pros and cons. Simon Willison (who looks about twelve years old and works at Yahoo!) seems like a genuinely smart guy who had some interesting thoughts on the whole JS library movement.
- Tantek Çelik's presentation on microformats was the most interesting to me, since I've been following the whole microformats thing but haven't implemented any. His presentation definitely got me thinking about all the places that I should be and could be using microformats and I think I'm going to start doing it in the very near future (one might see microformats in the next version of SimpleLog, perhaps...).
If anything, it was worth the trip just to meet some of the people I've been wanting to meet in person for a long time. When there's someone who you genuinely like and agree with, it's fantastic to meet them in person and be able to have a conversation in thirty seconds that would take days via email.
Finally met Reid Philpot in person (he used to run explodingfist.com), as well as Dan Cederholm (whose second-day keynote was quite good), and had a few beers and good conversation with Jon Hicks last night. Jon's a great guy and it was nice to finally meet him in person.
On a whole, I've had a good time these past few days. The conference was a little lacking information-wise, but I think I knew that might be the case going in. I'm off to France tomorrow to meet up with Katia and to start our vacation.