Mix06 - that's a wrap!

Here's some Mix06 day 2 and 3 pics, links and stuff...

Scott Guthrie's presentation went down well -

Wallace McClure liked the Atlas features he saw and met up with some Microsoft folks after the Atlas session.

eBay's Alan Lewis presented on using eBay Web Services to build a live.com gadget. He's built a gadget that searches through the eBay site and presents the results on the Live.com.

Met up with Nick Swann, over from the UK.

Shawn Morrissey (below) from the Windows Sidebar team was happy...the BBC showed off some of the very cool stuff they are doing with his product.

There was an unofficial microformats and structured blogging session at the end of the second day run by Marc Canter and Tantek.

It was fun. That conversation is ongoing.

Here's a video of the Bill Gates and Tim O'Reilly chat on day 1....

Those O'Reilly boys are everywhere...here's Jeff Pepper and John Osborn from O'Reilly Media:

Jeff Barr did a couple of Amazon sessions. One was on the Mechanical Turk service (I'm still blown away at how cool this idea is) and the other was on the Alexa search engine. Jeff was interviewed by a film crew at event, you can see the video here.

Talking of video, Kevin Briody wonders whether providing so much event content online might have the long term affect of reducing the value in attending these events inperson. He points to a post by TDavid who did a great job in covering a whole bunch of Mix06 stuff who argues that one can safely stay at home and get all the information they need via the web.  My view on this it that this has been happening for years since the internet arrived. The effect the web is having to event format design is that events are having to maximse the value of actually being there rather than virtually following the event online. For example - the question and answer sections of event sessions are taking up more and more of  the presentation time . If fact, the Q & A is increasingly becoming the event. To risk upsetting those who hate the overuse of certain phraseology, these types of events are becoming more like conversations and less like lectures. That's a good thing. It's going to be some years yet before VR tech gets to the point that allows you to have lunch with the IE team. In the meantime, there's Virtual Mix.

Other stuff I attended and enjoyed included the Spark recap session, the Identity Crisis / Identity Metasystem session hosted by Kim Cameron and the Windows RSS platform overview where Newsgator's CEO Greg Reinacker showed how their syncing across clients and devices uses the RSS feed store.

I thought the lounge areas were cool.

Dinner last night with Dion and his girlfriend was fun too:

Marc made a cameo appearance:

-

Tags: Mix06 Microsoft RSS microformats