Will someone please tell me…
Why the hell people don’t find technology conferences in meat-space the stupidest fucking thing ever? Anyone? It’s not even ironic, it’s just stupid. Hello? You’re attending a conference about using tools that allows location independence by booking a flight and staying in a hotel and PAYING ADMISSION to attend a swine flu orgy. Retards.
As an environmentalist I seethe with rage.
Webcasts are becoming much more common, but it’s hard to beat interacting with people in person when it comes to sharing knowledge and bouncing ideas off one another. It’s easier to group-discuss a topic between 6 people standing in a group than it is doing so in an IRC chatroom.
Plus, it’s good to come out one’s shell every so often and see the world. Travel is fun, dude! :)
Your argument is “convenience”? THAT’S HILARIOUS.
No, my argument is value.
It’s much more valuable when done in person. I guess I wasn’t clear on that.
Everybody I know who engages in conference calls (with or without a web-based aspect, be it chat or screen-sharing or video or whatever) has a special level of dread reserved for them which is at least an order of magnitude bigger than that associated with ordinary meatspace meetings—however much of a waste of time either of them might be.
The technology may exist for absolutely flawless web-driven conferences, but it’s certainly not widespread thanks to a simple matter of economics: skimp on the bandwidth here, the latency here, implement the whole thing in Java, and you’ve saved yourself (as the provider) tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars—a cost borne in kind by the users of the service. Hell, they can’t even get it right for voice conferences: instead using the shittiest-quality (that is, cheapest) VoIP trunks imaginable.
