Wrapping up my day at IT360

Well, so ends my day at IT360. My last seminar of the day was with Kris Hadlock who I berated for saying that Molson was a good Canadian beer. He’s a cool guy who managed to hack up a few proof of concept scripts for the audience after he was done speaking. My notes don’t do him justice. His session was very code heavy and I didn’t want to type all that. Check out his studio.

After that seminar I wandered around the exhibitors’ hall, signed up for three issues of Linux Magazine for $10, chatted with some vendors and was photographed by one of the publicists. I couldn’t get much in the way of swag other than the conference’s messenger bag, four Symantec pens and a cira pen.

The ideas I took away from this day of the conference are these:

• Firebug is a really, really cool web development tool
• The cloud and skiphour tags are underappreciated in RSS2.0 and I should keep them in mind when analyzing subscriber data
• My suspicion that my generation makes up for its lack of tv watching with internet time is reinforced
• Holding contests is a novel way to harness mass collaboration that works out favourably for the holder
• Sam Adam’s is a great beer but it’s not worth it once it crosses the border

The most entertaining seminar was the Wikinomics one. I hope I can get ahold of a free copy of the book tomorrow so I can read through it in depth for more concrete examples and figures.