I love web people conferences. I’ve only attended one so far, but the joys of web-related careers is that web people have a tendency to blog about pretty much any aspect of their existence (in Mindflykateer Karina’s case, her typical topic of bowels might be a bit too much disclosure for most, but she’ll be damned if she’ll let that stop her). Conferences tend to be on that list of typographical diarrhe.

The reason for my commentary is An Event Apart: San Francisco. Did I attend? Alas, no, although I need to get around to visiting that city without my ex-girlfriend, since my only post-childhood visit to that metropolis was ruined by her refusal to check out the Chinatown lunar festival that was going on mere feet from our hotel in favor of a swing dance event (note, I can’t dance. At all. She was going to dance for her).

However, thanks to awesome attendees, I can get a lot of the guts of the event via awesome summaries such as this one by Jeremy Keith, discussing Day One of the event. His post on the subject manages to capture the digestible, ethereal essence of the conference while shedding the malign, useless husk of buzzwords and coffee cups that pile up in such events.

This is excellent. It makes me feel like I’m learning useful things despite this week’s obsession with drawing robots with vector graphics. Hooray!

Perhaps it was unwise for me to create the newest comic, as I hope to attend An Event Apart eventually, and poking fun at the event’s creators/hosts/organizers (Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman) isn’t exactly the best way to go about doing that. However, I will admit, the first time I saw Zeldman in person, at Web Directions North ‘08, I couldn’t help but think “Gee, give him an axe and some chain mail and he’d fit right in in Khazad-dûm.” Mind you, I’m referencing the place when it was home to the dwarves, not its later days as Moria, home to a bunch of jerk orcs.

I’m not sure if that distinction is helping my case.

I did not, in fact, attend AEA: Boston. I greatly wish I had, but such was not meant to be.

Thanks to the very nature of the conference’s attendees (aka web people), though, I do get the opportunity to experience a great deal of information about what it was like to attend! There are flickr feeds, detailed blog posts about attendees‘ impressions of the event, summaries of each session’s relevant info (quite a few good ones by Luke Wroblewski), and slides being shared by the presenters. This is in addition to the various conglomeration of tweets that occurred during the conference itself, forming a real-time record of what was happening, while it was happening.

I’m still getting around to sitting down and trying to digest this cornucopia of second-hand information. With the speed at which technology changes, I can’t help but feel that there’s no such thing as taking a month off learning more about the industry I’m in. It’s a never-ending process. That’s why I think conferences like AEA are so important, as it provides a continually-refreshing wellspring of new, relevant views and information about what we do.

One piece of data that I have had the chance to digest, however, is the frequently repeated opinion that Jared Spool is an amazing speaker. I can agree, as I had the pleasure of listening to him at WDN08. I don’t know how someone can have that much energy when talking about user interfaces, but I’m glad he does, because it keeps the rest of us interested about the topic, which is admittedly pretty important.