@Media – thoughts

So yes, as I said earlier this week, I spent Thursday and Friday at the @Media conference in London. And yes, I did enjoy most of it – and some of it has proved to be useful, or given me ideas, so in that context it was pretty successful, I’d say.

On the first day, the initial signs weren’t that great, in honesty. The registration took forever – apparently most techies names start with A-D. Who knew? So while all the people whose initials started J-Z were constantly getting called out of the queue, because those “registration stations” were empty, all the people from A-I were stuck in one big queue, and then the A-Ds were still stuck in a queue once they’d got past the first one. In all it took nearly 45 minutes to get registered – quite impressive, considering they’d initially only allocated from 8-8:45 to register everyone. Still, all part of the learning curve, I suppose. After all, it’s only the second @Media conference at all.

The only other real complaint would be about the provisions. Yeah, they were great if you drank tea or coffee, but there didn’t seem to be anything for people who wanted water, or any other soft drinks at all. Even tea was a bit of a struggle – but water was a nightmare. And the food provided at lunchtimes, while of a pretty good quality (and having been sourced to Leiths) was – to be blunt – small. A selection of sandwiches, and a tiny bowl of Thai Curry or Singapore noodles? Not really a lot, considering each person there had paid at least £400 for the privilege.

However, when the complaints are done with, the rest of the conference went really smoothly, was well organised, and had plenty of interesting stuff.

For me, the highlights are probably Jeff Veen‘s section on Thursday, which was absolutely fantastic, and gave me a lot of food for thought, and Friday’s one would most probably be Dan Cederholm‘s presentation on “Bulletproof Web Design”, which made for some interesting points – some of which were about stating the obvious, but it was still a good presentation.

There was a lot of other stuff that was good, and some that kind of didn’t hit the mark – for example, the presentation about designing websites and content for mobile use didn’t hit the mark (for me, anyway), and nor did the one about WCAG2.0 (Web Accessibility Guidelines) which was interesting enough, but to me could’ve gone so much further.

All told though, I’d say it was well worth the money, and the getting up at 5.45 in order to be on the train for 7am.

Now, when’s the booking start for the 2007 one?