Home From New York. Excellent Trip, But Sometimes Frustrating Conference. - 02/14/2009 - 12:01 PM:

We're back from the conference, now - we arrived late on Thursday night, and I think everyone is glad to be home. Dan has returned to Florida, and I'm pretty sure everyone on the team is going to basically hibernate for the weekend.

Due to an inconsistent Internet connection at the hotel, the BookLamp Flickr and Twitter feeds ended up being our friends. Hopefully you knew they existed (the next iteration of CGHM will feature them more obviously).

I'll talk about the Tools of Change conference in more depth next week, but it was both interesting and very positive. Every private meeting was simply excellent. The actual panels, though, gave me very mixed feelings. There is a very specific focus in the publishing industry that seems to be all about books, and about virtually nothing else. I watched a panel discussing why video games such as World of Warcraft have such strong online retention rates compared to reading, and it drove me up the wall. After working in the game industry for seven years before starting BookLamp in earnest, many of the questions that they're asking have been studied and answered before. But when asked the questions about the online role and delivery of content, too often the answer was, "We don't know. No one knows."

Which is not true at all. Many of the panels themselves seemed to have great knowledge of publishing, but only peripheral knowledge of the other fields that are being successful in these areas. For example, I was at a conference a few years ago that focused on video game addiction with games like WOW, and the conclusion was that there is no such thing as "game addiction" specifically. If you removed the social, online element of games, the addiction virtually disappeared. Game Addiction is much the same thing as other online addictions - chatting online, cell phone addiction, these sorts of things. So in answer to the question, "Why does WOW attract and retain people when reading online doesn't," the answer is not, "No one knows."

I think the event could be improved a bit by spreading the expertise out from simply publishing. Instead of bringing in publishers and asking them about the technology they're using, maybe they should bring in some technology people and ask them what they would do in publishing. But enough about that for now.

The Internet at the hotel was extremely iffy, sometimes unusably slow. The Flickr feed for photos (and at the end, videos) was extremely useful, as was the Twitter feed. I think they'll play a bigger role in the future.

Hope everyone has a good weekend. See you on Monday.

Aaron