The mesh conference wrapped up a couple of hours ago. Final thoughts:

Day 2 wasn’t quite as good as day 1, if you ask me. There was more of a marketing focus today (there was a venture capital/PR stream as well, but I ignored that), and it felt like the potential of the conference got a bit lost in the noise of the “blogs are an extension of marketing” vs. “blogs are the end of marketing” debate; yesterday, the “old” media vs. “new” media debate seemed more reasoned and friendly, but today the marketing/PR people seemed to be dug into a trench. Or maybe that was just how I heard it. Anyway…

The first two keynote speakers — Steve Rubel and Paul Kedrosky — were both great, especially Kedrosky. He’s very funny, and has some great stories about who’s getting funding and why.

By the way, lots of people were liveblogging the keynote sessions, in case you want the summary versions of what was said. Technorati should point you in the right direction.

Of the “15 minutes of fame” spots, my favourite was Favorville.com…even though the poor guy talking to us about it was interrupted by a shrill and persistent fire alarm. It drives me nuts when the security desk comes on every few minutes to tell you…exactly what they told you a few minutes ago. Or to give you useless information like “The fire alarm was triggered on the fourth floor of the south building…that’s the fourth floor of the south building…not the concourse level.” Uh, that’s great; can you clarify for me whether or not there are deadly flames? That I’d like to know. Sheezus.

Tara Hunt was next. Maybe I was expecting the wrong things from her keynote, but I wasn’t wowed. Strange, ’cause if you hear her talk for five minutes, you’d kind of expect to be wowed when she has a whole hour to herself. She’s obviously smart, and I could just tell from her comments and reactions in the afternoon panel (which I’ll get to in a minute) that our brains were in the same place on the topics at hand…but I just didn’t feel like I knew anything new after her hour was up.

After lunch I had three session. The first and third were very focused on marketing, brand, PR…all stuff that I think is the devil, so it was interesting watching the two camps — the old guard who suspect something’s up and keep saying “blog-o-sphere” hoping that they’ll fit in, and the idealists who want to lead a revolution to kill marketing and PR as we know it but keep getting shouted down in their company’s meetings — face off politely. The best point of the day, I thought, went to Jonathan Ehrlich from Chapters.Indigo, who simply stated that you can have the best marketing in the world, but unless you have a kickass product behind it,the marketing’s pointless. To me, this seems like common sense, but some people actually debated him about it. Specifically, they claimed that it was marketing that made the iPod great; Ehrlich’s point was that the product was good first; then came the top-notch marketing. Good product + great marketing = #1; great product + shite marketing = Creative Labs. Their players have more functions, longer battery lives and better prices. Ever heard of ’em? Exactly.

The second session of the afternoon was about corporate blogging. Tara Hunt was back for this one; they also brought up Jeremy Wright and Debbie Weil, whose comments were as vapid as her site is godawful. You know when someone gets about 50% of what’s going on (I mean in the grand scheme of things, not just what went on in the session), but thinks they’re an expert, and talks to everyone else — most of whom fully get it — as if they’re the expert? Everyone in the room just rolls their eyes and laughs a little bit? That’s kinda what this was like. In spite of this, I did manage to catch a few useful tips from Jeremy and the audience about how to sell executives on corporate blogging, so maybe I can take another run at mine.

.:.

The conference was a pretty good time, and tomorrow I’ll be pushing some of what filtered into my head out into my work blog(s), but I’ll be curious to see what’s on the agenda for next year. Will there be two days’ worth of new topics 363 days from now? Hard to say. Did I get anything out of it this year? Honestly, I think it may have been worth the money just to get the kind of kick in the ass that the 5-minute speech from Elissa Gjertson of Are You Frank? gave yesterday.

.:.

I arrived home today to find my “Bomb The Blogosphere” t-shirt in the mail, one day after I really needed it. Oh fate, why must you tempt me with tardy vestments?

[tags]mesh06, mesho conference[/tags]