More Con’s to put on the expense account…

Scoble ponders on “March – the month of conferences“.

I’ve always assumed March is always packed with conferences because it’s the end of the financial year. In most companies, if you don’t use up your budget by the end of the financial year, you not only loose the money but may also get a reduced budget next year. (you see where I’m going here..?)

So for March, in addition to the excellent ETech (and it is excellent) and SxSW (which I’ve never done), Microsoft is adding Mix06 too (in Vegas, baby!). [I’m only doing ETech this year, I think].

I’m not actually sure who Mix06 is actually aimed at – it is billed as:

• How can I extend my content and services into the living room?
• How can I protect my users from phishers and pharmers?
• How can I develop and debug AJAX applications quickly and efficiently?
• How can I effectively monetize RSS?

Don’t get me wrong, it seems like some interesting topics – but it isn’t anything I’m particularlly involved with (I certainly don’t need to prevent phishing or monetise RSS. I just wish I got to do some code these days, and then I would need to debug AJAX – oh joy!).

And anyone who’s visited my flat will know how I’m already ‘extending content and services into our living room’ – and feeding some of that back into some of the stuff going on at BBC (my setup doesn’t involve a Windows Media Centre or XBox360, however).

Of course, you can put on any of these kinds of conferences and you’re guaranteed to get a portion of the “conference circuit set” attending. For me, however, there’s no business case for me to be there — unless Microsoft want to throw me a free ticket + expenses :). I’ll happily moderate the backchannel for them!

In fact Robert asks:

“Will Bill Gates let us put a back channel up during his keynote?”

After watching the interchange at Les Blogs between Mena and Ben, I’d guess not, but you never know. This isn’t going to be a PDC or a TechED.

lol! Oh, attending my next conference – whatever it ends up being – is going to such fun, isn’t it???!?!?!!!