So Many Stages
Quite suddenly, workshops and seminars seem to be all the rage, don’t they? The Carson Workshops schedule keeps growing, and the shows selling out. They recently announced a Web applications summit in London that frankly sounds amazing. UIE recently announced a six-city roadshow, and seats are already selling. Clear:left is sponsoring a one-day show on Ajax programming starring the indominitable Jeremy Keith. And then of course there’s my personal favorite, An Event Apart, which sold out six weeks before the Philadelphia event (which is, yikes, now only a week away!) and is soon to visit other cities. Keep an eye on the AEA RSS feed to get the latest on those cities, by the way.
Look over all the workshops’ line-ups, and you see a lot of big names and smart people standing on stages (or at least in front of rooms) talking about some truly important and interesting topics. A determined workshop-goer could run him- or herself quite ragged trying to catch even half the shows, given their geographic dispersion and temporal proximity. It’s almost a shame, because every one of them sounds really, really interesting. Have I said the word “interesting” enough times yet?
But really, the most interesting part to me is not that these seminars are being announced, but that they’re generating such strong interest—that they’re selling out. It’s another indicator, and a very clear one, that the industry is well and truly recovering.
Addendum: just to add a little bit more support to what I said, 37signals announced their overhauled Basecamp seminar, The Getting Real Workshop, and sold all fifty seats in twelve hours. Whoa.
