<Head> Conference is rocking! and thoughts about the past and future of webconferences October 25, 2008
It's all about getting ... <head>
Dude, this is the way conference presentations should be. Hella fun. No messy travel plans, No standing in lines at airports, No rental car misadventures with wrong MapQuest printouts. No need to dressup. No consuming bad closest-restaurant-to-hotel food+coffee. No worrying about hooking up the projectors, no worrying about having enough battery power, or being close to an outlet, or being able to read the slides clearly behind the head of the person in front of you, all the while juggling the cup of coffee and danish and laptop in the lap. No trying to rush get to the session conveniently located the opposite end of the convention center, only to find the room already at capacity. No staying up late nights adding last minute details to presentations... well okay that's tradition.
I'll be presenting in a few minutes in room 2 (schedule changed) on 'One SWF' to rule them all on what I think is a very cool approach to maintaining swf portability between web and AIR runtimes, which wasn't possible in Flash9, not sure about the Flash10. I'll be showing an app that when running in AIR can create, update, read and delete images from a webcam to the desktop, and when running the same swf running from the server, can create, read, update, and delete those images on the appropriately configured server via a PHP All with only a few paragraphs of code. Try that with C++!
It's day2 at if you're not "there", you should definitely check it out, I'm loving it. It's a distinctly different flavor than the traditional conferences I've been to so far like Max, Flex|360. Also if your in San Fran, London. you might be able to still attend one of the live hubs. Even Second Life.
Having helped run a few conferences and presented a few times, I know how challenging and rewarding putting on an event like this can be, I've been on all sides of the podium, IT, organizer and presenters. This conference (like all) has had some significant technical issues. But really the problems are expected, it's how the team recovers, and managing expectations. So far Aral and his team are doing a great job rolling with the punches. In the end as disappointing as it is for all when a presentation doesn't work right, the chat always works so in some ways it's more collaborative than the normal conferences.
It's my first time attending a conference via Connect, counter intuitively I find it's pretty intimate, a buzz of chat, the low threshold in which anybody can join the fray. the live face of a person talking, and well miced, bandwidth permitting.
The Past of Online Presentations
Waxing philosophical. It's funny how life can take you round full circle. Back in 2000 right, right after the first wave of dot-com-fallout. I joined a small company called Presedia who had the same goals I mentioned in the first paragraph. At the time, somewhat at the start of the first internet bubble, the web was in it's first golden age. Presedia's target was the corporate market, where as R&D turned into commercialization, routine "Road Shows" would be organized to put gobs of salespeople in the same room, up to date on what they would soon be selling. Getting 1000's of people across the country into the same room with enough donuts wasn't cheap.. gas wasn't $3-4/gallon either at the time.
So Presedia had the simple idea, make PowerPoint web friendly, add a plugin to the desktop to narrate, it, and upload it, share it, have it play in the webbrowser. As an aside, I think that Microsoft's failure to make the office suite web friendly has spurred countless competition like this.
The first client for Presedia, was...Sun Microsystems, which had just 3 years earlier created the Java programming language. Java was the darling of the day, applets were going places that html and even Flash just couldn't touch. As at the time Flash 4, just turned to Flash 5, scripting was still mostly timeline hacks, like instead of a function, it used gotoAndPlay("doSomething") !!! for loops were gotoAndPlay, then gotoAndPlay! (and we had to walk uphills both ways, with dialup).
After getting a reliable presentation narration, and conversion. Ironically, Java as the front end on the network (in particular sun) was very finicky about streaming through corporate firewalls and after months of headbanging. I in a bold move told the CEO and President that we should explore using Flash for the presentations and player, at the time I was a server side engineer working in Java. I was the only person in the team with any design ability, or any particular care for what is now the IxD field, and could put up with Flash's extremely quirky nature. So I was asked to come up with a prototype which I built by hand, and the CTO started investigating rendering PowerPoint to Flash instead of Java. This was a rather significant and positive step for both Presedia and myself.
Turns out for me, that working with visual components made me far happier than working purely server side, and my intuitions that Flash > Java for the presentations were correct. We had far fewer problems, and the presentations streamed and started better. Fast Forward... Presedia became Macromedia Breeze, and Breeze became Adobe Connect which is the technology, that powers the conference. And I've been preparing yet another PowerPoint to get converted to Flash. Deja Vu!
Given that was 10 years ago, makes me wonder, did Dinosaurs have PowerPoint?
Another strange connection, is one of the conferences I helped organize was largely Singularity oriented, and in it's recent incarnation has turned into "SingularitySummit". The original name of the conference was Singularity, which confused me for the longest period of time.
The other amusing bits, at the time PowerPoint to Flash was a very proprietary and expensive thing to purchase. Now PowerPoint to Flash conversion is in the commodity camp. There are $50-$100 stand alone tools with unlimited, and Open Office will do it for free. I'm actually using Open Office (built in Java) to create the presentation for the talk, that will be converted to Flash.
The Future of Online Presentations + Conferences
I think that <head> is a good example of how conferences are going to go. In many ways is a parallel to the way home theater is competing with traditional movie sales. With the ubiquity in highspeed bandwidth, the sensory impact between online and physical conferences is less, and in some cases opposite, online can have higher fidelity than live. Like I'm watching on a big screen perfectly setup, I have headphones, the speakers have headphones rather than drifting in and out of the mic.
In head's level, the convenience overshadows other. As the technology get's more solid with tools like Connect, the barrier to entry drops, it takes less skill, costs less for all, takes less time. Soon kids will be throwing conferences for kids.
Having participated in 'unconferences' and 'conferences'. <head> took a nice middle ground. It was scheduled so I knew what I was going in for, but the sessions were 30minutes, which like TED talks reminds me that brevity is a powerful ally. As since we are on the web, further details are only a few clicks away. It felt very different more like a group of friends piled into the living room vrs attending church. It felt more community oriented than hierarchical. With the chat window on the bottom, and back channel communication with other speakers, it felt very much like a dashboard...it was reassuring where as live presentations, sometimes no audio man, just a bunch of people sitting quietly it often feels a bit exposed.
There is a qualitative difference in the stress levels of the speakers. I'll call it the "home turf" advantage. Most of the presenters presented as they lived, either at home, or at work, a few like myself rolling out of bed, walking into the home office a few feet away. relaxed. Some taking beer breaks in the presentation! (hey it's the weekend). One was even presenting in a car, via a community wireless she just found, where she parked.
This is to me a success of the web, taking the best that people have to offer, of the people across the world, without taking them out of their normal elements. The presentations are a bit rougher, more improvised, briefer, but what they don't offer in 'performance' they more than make up in charm, and commradarie. Especially in today's rapid moving times, the nature of a presentation being a dialog than a narrative feels appropriate. With the audience at all levels, a dialog is also the best way to ensure that people at all skill levels are at the same page. Rather than stilted, they feel more honest, more philosophical, more heartfelt, less of a corporate agenda, many of the goals weren't at a tech level, but rather increasingly purpose driven. In each presentation the person's personality showed through. All a very positive experience.
I missed most of Friday's sessions, (partly due to work) now I'm sorry I missed them, I suspect that this is one of the challenges for virtual conferences, it's harder to cleanly separate the time for a conference as when it's a trip. Though at least for me, I end up finding conferences filled with work anyway.
With the upcoming tide of virtual conferences, one thing I think this all means to presenters, are you should get used to having:
- a decent webcamera, ideally a decent backdrop (unless you've got a green screen like Aral) $20-30
- decent light, as webcams suck on low-light. A window nearby will do, but at night time I was practically invisible until I pointed some lights on me. Aral in the excellent speaker orientation recommended a firewire plus conventional DV cam, which is a good though far less portable
- a good headset mic - knowing how to set it up, adjust levels $30 at Radio Shack
- have a few subjects you could contribute to the community, in your backpocket you can present easily. Note you don't have to be a super genius, the community exists at all levels.
- that the number of conferences is increasing to a steady dialog. So in some cases picking.This reminds me over burningman, in that you won't be able to experience everything, so you have to prudent in what makes it and not. Even though many of these conferences will be recorded and later made public, there is something about being there able to see it unfold that makes it more special, perhaps it's just the allocation of time and attention.
Here are some other pics and reviews.
Jeremy Adactio (with pics!)
Mark Grossnickle attendee, )
1 responses to '<Head> Conference is rocking! and thoughts about the past and future of webconferences'
[...] Feedback by participants on blogs, Twitter, etc. has been fast and effusive, e.g. “Dude, this is the way conference presentations should be. Hella fun. No messy travel plans, No standing in lines at airports, No rental car misadventures with wrong MapQuest printouts. No need to dress up. No consuming bad closest-restaurant-to-hotel food+coffee. No worrying about hooking up the projectors, no worrying about having enough battery power, or being close to an outlet, or being able to read the slides clearly behind the head of the person in front of you, all the while juggling the cup of coffee and danish and laptop in the lap. No trying to rush to get to the session conveniently located the opposite end of the convention center, only to find the room already at capacity. No staying up late nights adding last minute details to presentations… well okay that’s tradition.” (from TroyWorks). [...]
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