MESH - Day 1 Round-Up

Day 1 of this year's MESH conference is in the books.  A good day all things considered.  Lots of pics, complements of Photojunkie.  David, Barnaby and I all made the flickr stream.

I've already mentioned the keynote with Michael Arrington, so I won't dwell on it.

I wanted to attend the session on The Web and Philanthropy, which featured Tom Williams from GiveMeaning.com.  Luckily, I had a chance to chat with him the night before at the speakers dinner.  He is extraordinarily passionate about this topic and his new venture is taking a very fresh approach to tackling the problem.  People had good things to say about the session.  (Oh, by the way - givemeaning.com runs on .NET)

Several people I talked to went to Blogging 101 and heard it was a little too basic, but that the folks that were there had good energy for the discussion.

I did attend "The Future Of Entertainment" session.  It featured Jian Ghomeshi, McLean Mashingaidze-Greaves, Amber MacArthur and Ethan Kaplan.  I had big hopes for the discussion, but it was top-heavy with music folks and once Michael Geist started talking DRM it really spun off the rails.  Not that the questions and debate on DRM aren't valuable, but I really felt that the rest of the audience didn't want to spend that much time on the topic.  Several people had questions for Amber and were disappointed when she had to leave and didn't come back.

The day ended with a sponsor / speaker appreciation dinner at Archeo in the Distillery District.  Good food, good fun.

note - they gave all the speakers red underwear as a gift.  odd.

Most valuable part of day 1?  Meeting a lot of amazing people from Canada's Technical and Web communities.  Some really smart folks.  Not all of them are big fans of Microsoft - that's ok.  It's about the conversation and I took away some great feedback and I think the discussion is helping them understand us better.

What's up today?

I am moderating a session on Community and I am VERY excited.  My guests will be - Will Pate , Jordan Banks and Lionel Menchaca .  Some very smart folks - it will be a great conversation.

I am also watching for Rick Segal and his VC session.

Right now is the keynote with Richard Edleman.  Up next - Craiglist's Jim Buckmaster .

I'm off to MESH......

ps.  I am keeping a running list of suggestions for next year that I will post at the end of Day 2.

Technorati tags: MESH07, Toronto Tech Week, Toronto, Canada, Events, Web 2.0