Webvisions07: a haiku

no expectations
my predictions were correct
left uninspired

Ok, that’s a bit one-sided and unfair. (Although not off-base.)

* Casual Gaming: Blah. Nothing against Phillip Kerman, he was engaging enough, but the entire topic focused on what he does (to be expected), which was games for MSN Messenger (not what I’m interested in).

* The User is Always Right: Really well executed presentation. Lots of good tips, but mostly just covering the intro level.

* Pescovitz keynote: Totally in awe of the man (Institute for the Future, BoingBoing and Make magazine—applause) but found the keynote lacking in that special boost that makes me want to run out of the convention center and take on the world. Perhaps not the intent, but it felt like it was supposed to be.

* Secrets to Project Management: Entertaining speaker, good slides and the worksheets are much appreciated. I found it hilarious the questions kept coming back to estimating and new business development (since he was talking about proposals/deliverables) but he kept sloughing it off with the vibe that “another department” handles that. Felt like half (at least) the audience was a bit deflated at that point—for a lot of us, we are the business development team. We’re also the designers and the developers and the project managers. Good ideas to incorporate into BePrivy though.

* What Makes Great Indie Media? (roundtable): Interesting enough conversation I guess, but the only thing I took away from it was “the ums are what making you interesting”. Very intro feeling.

* Web App Page Hierarchy: Caught the last 75% of this. Pretty intro stuff but Luke Wroblewski was a great speaker and kept everybody interested. Didn’t really learn anything new, but it was still worth it just to see a different style of presentation.

* Videopodcasting 2.0: Lots of heart and definitely passionate about video and her site, but overall I was pretty disappointed with this one. Way more intro-level than the description said it would be.

* Ask A Ninja keynote: Enjoyed the business talk, spiced with their banter. Was afraid it was going to be the other way around, just a bunch of fluff. (although that would have been entertaining so…)

Overall—the future of the web felt more like intro to the web.

There’s more in-depth reviews of Webvisions07 over at the PDXWI site.