Steve Hargadon, the magician who breaths life into old technology with open source, spent a lot of hours and brain cells yesterday creating a list of NECC presenters (NECC 2007 Session Tags and Feeds). Along with their name is the title of the presentation they will deliver. Obviously, a lot of time — but the NECC web site already has this. What is huge is that beneath the session title is a link to coded searches for blog entries and Flickr photos from that presentation, as well as RSS feeds for people who want include tagged references to the session in their aggregators — all based on session tags provided by NECC. This is enormous.
Not only that, but Steve has also set up a Twitter account for the Bloggers’ Cafe at NECC (Bloggers’ Cafe at NECC 2007). I guess I should come to understand this Twitter thing.
Check it out at Steve’s blog, and also check out his Technology Rescue Wiki.
I think that we’re seeing one of the qualities of the new web here, where extremely valuable conference services are coming from outside the conference — from the audience.