With a very small team of organizers (Nathanial Talbott and Jeremy McAnally), the Ruby Hoedown was a nice blend of high level, big thought talks with some technical ones. It’s a nice balance for a day and a half conference where the focus was on sharing knowledge and meeting others in the Ruby community. A great added bonus was the fact that the conference was only $100 to attend.

While on a much larger scale, SXSW provides a similar type of environment composed of these two similar factors – a blend of high level vs. low level talks and a focus on the interactions of the attendees.

While large conferences like RailsConf, SXSW, and Gnomedex obviously draw big names and large audiences, smaller regional conferences may provide the most for your investment when you consider how much easier it is to get to know attendees. I walked away from the Hoedown with new knowledge and some new friends that may spur my business in unforeseen future directions.

I hope these regional conferences are a trend that continues.

The panel went quite well in my opinion as we accomplished my goal of covering the topics we laid out in advance. With such a limited time for a broad topic, our objective was to bring certain issues and ideas to the forefront on RSS and its marketing uses. I think all the panelists would agree that with more time, we would have enjoyed diving deeper into examples and specifics on RSS marketing tactics.

My strategy for assembling the panel was to get a group together that I wanted to have a conversation and with some advance discussion, I feel this came across in the panel as we had a nice rapport.

John was attributed with this great quote during the panel:

If you have a crappy marketing message RSS is only going to make it easier to spread your crappy message.

Amen. Remember that RSS is only the distribution medium and not an end in itself.

I also found numerous reviews and live blogging accounts of the panel. Check them out for a full recap.

Center Networks
Permaquid Crunch
A View of the World
EchoSXSW
Read/WriteWeb
karmalized
Traces of Inspiration
10,000 Marshmallows
antonolsen.com

Thanks again to my panelists as well as all the attendees. I had a great time doing the panel.

Technorati Tags: conferences, sxsw

Overall the panels were excellent this year, but it’s always obvious which panels actually took the time to talk in advance and prepare ahead of time. Of course, my panel prepared thoroughly! But the best part of SXSW is the ability to easily meet new people and make some connections. Many new ideas and potential projects were ignited for me last week and I hope to be writing some all of them soon.

Technorati Tags: conferences, sxsw

If you’re here for SXSW, check out the panel I’m moderating Sunday morning at 10am, Using RSS for Marketing.

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Please visit her post and add your thoughts (even if you can’t attend this year). One of the ideas I’m specifically interested in hearing about is how your business uses RSS for marketing or unconventional ways. Let us know what you’re doing with RSS and we can share it with a large audience at SXSW.

Technorati Tags: conferences, sxsw, rss

The panel is set for Sunday, March 11, 2007 from 10-11am. Our speakers include:

Emily Chang – Ideacodes, eHub

Greg Reinacker – NewsGator

John Jantsch – Duct Tape Marketing

Bill Flitter – Pheedo

Look for some posts in the upcoming months as we bounce some ideas off our readers to see if we can enhance the value and content of this panel. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let us know.

SXSW also has a list of the confirmed speakers and panels for the event.

Yes, I proposed a panel this year and after attending SXSW last year, its a topic I feel will be well received. Despite the fact that RSS is truly the glue of the new Internet, there was only one panel on RSS last year (and one on XML). The last few talks I’ve given on Marketing with RSS have had great responses from the audiences, so I though it would be fun to do this topic as a panel at SXSW.

My proposed panel title is “Using RSS for Marketing” and is listed under the “branding / marketing” and “web 2.0″ categories. Here is the panel description:

Using RSS for Marketing

Now that RSS is starting to hit the mainstream, how can it be used for more than just syndicating blog posts? Savvy businesses are starting to use RSS for a variety of marketing purposes including advertising, iRSS, and podcasting. This panel will discuss the current trends and examples of RSS marketing, specific steps to use RSS for marketing, and RSS publisher best practices.

Anyone can vote even if you are not planning on attending the conference. If you’re doing anything related to the Internet, web technologies, interactive design, or entrepreneurship though, you absolutely need to attend this conference. Last year’s conference was a great experience – highly informative and motivating. Additionally, the whole event was highlighted by all the great people I met.

My presentation slides can be found here (PDF, 2MB).

UPDATE: Presentations for most speakers as well as a podcast are available here.

The 2006 eduWeb Conference is being held in the beautiful Sheraton Inner Harbor, Baltimore, MD. The eduWeb Conference is unique to higher education! It’s the only conference that offers attendees a combination of Web development and Web marketing topics presented by some of the top speakers in the country. This year’s conference is expecting web, marketing, communications and admissions professionals from around the country and the world!

My focus in the presentation will be using RSS feeds for marketing, specifically in the context of the education industry. Up to this point, I think this has been an area under served by many of the new implementations of RSS feeds so I think it will be a great opportunity for discussion. If anyone has any interesting applications of using feeds in education, leave a comment as I’m interested in hearing of developments in this area.