OSCON presentation

I'm sitting at OSCON trying to rework my presentation for this audience, and it's about as difficult as I expected.

I don't yet have a feel for the audience. I'm somewhat surprised how few people seem to be developers of open source software, and instead it seems somewhat like a conference for OSS users, which is not at all what I expected.

I'm definitely still tainted from the Web 2.0 conference last year; I keep wanting to make snide jokes about the froth that surrounded the conference, and I'm still pretty bitter how much attention web companies with no business model get when infrastructure companies with a pretty good model just get ignored.

So, I decided to attend Doc Searls's tutorial on Marketing to People Who Hate Marketing, and I'm getting Web 2.0 flashbacks. He warned us in the beginning that he didn't know how to create a 3.5 hour tutorial, and now I believe him. It's true that he's speaking a bit about marketing, but he's much more focused on describing to us what he thinks the new market is, rather than teaching us how to speak to it, or create a new one, or whatever. Yes, blogs and podcasts and flickr are all the shiznit, but is this really the only way to look at the world?

Or if it is the only way to look at the world, then can't it be talked about in a way that seems less like religious froth and more like analysis of some kind? I don't like being preached to about anything, much less blogs and podcasts by someone made famous by blogs and podcasts.

I think the sessions are a good bit less Web 2.0 froth, and most of the people I've spoken to weren't all frothy, so I expect that this is an exception not the rule at OSCON.

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 | Tags: sysadmin