Still a few ETech slots

I get brownie points at O'Reilly for mentioning ETech, so...

[shameless plug]

I'm actually doing a half-day tutorial session on "Creating Passionate Users", Monday morning (the first day of the conference). I have heard that my tutorial may be full already, but I'm not positive, and I know the conference itself is still accepting registrations. They do allow registration for the complete conference (sessions + tutorials), just the sessions, or just the tutorials. So it's possible to register for just the tutorial (about $1200 less than the full conference).

The best thing about the conference, though, is all the other people who are presenting--they're about a zillion times smarter and more interesting than me (except I like my topic better ; ). A few of the highlights include Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Chris Anderson, Joel Spolsky, Clay Shirky, and someone you might not have heard of but who I'm a big fan of--J.C. Herz.

Marc Hedlund, founder of Lucas Online (LucasFilm's internet division) and Popular Power (first commercial P2P platform) saw a smaller, book-oriented version of this at Foo Camp, and here's what he had to say in an ETech blog My Picks From the Emerging Technology Conference:

Creating Passionate Users - Kathy Sierra
"I saw this talk at Foo Camp last year, and it was fantastic. A clear, well-presented session on how to involve people in your product and make them very excited about it. Kathy talks about how the "Head First" book series (which came into a very crowded Java book space and jumped to the front of the market) was developed, but her ideas apply to many kinds of products."

He then goes on to talk about his other picks including:
Endangered Devices, Building Communities with Software, Lessons Learned whiel Building Basecamp, Hardware Hacks from the Far Side, Re:MixMe, and Marc is giving a talk on how to raise venture capital if you're a geek.

I wasn't there last year, although Eric and Beth both presented there on some of the amazing things they were doing with digital content at Disney. They had some great things to say about it... Eric? Beth? Jump in here. I'm assuming it's an organized, more structured, larger version of Foo Camp... without the sleeping in tents part.

[/shameless plug]