RSS Winterfest

I'm listening to RSS Winterfest, a two-day web-based conference discussing the RSS news syndication format. It's a remarkably rich enviroment for getting people working together all at the same time, using a combination of an audio feed (via On24), an IRC channel on freenode's "#rss-winterfest" channel, a Socialtext eventspace conference wiki, and other channels. There are at current count over 400 people who have hit the wiki - don't know the entire event attendance - the IRC channel has 35 folks chatting live at 3pm Eastern.

New to the mix in this iteration is an RSS feed coming from our wiki - that's proven to be very handy to keep up with what's going on.

If we didn't have a whole bunch of non-audio tools going in parallel, it would seem like a very, very long conference call. Two very, very long conference calls, and those are very tiring at best. But all of the coordinated online tools let you have a feel for browsing the whole thing and letting your attention be profitably divided rather than just tuning out when the talk gets boring.