Got to ETech late last night, and sat through the advertainment talks this morning. Oddly, this is my first O'Reilly conference. Suggestion, if you charge over a thousand dollars for a conference, you shouldn't give a medium conference T-shirt to a 6'1", 200 lb guy and you should have munchies at the mid-morning coffee break. Inexpensive and free conferences can do it, so can expensive big conferences =)
I am all bitter lately, kind of weird. That said, here is some more =) If you are going to geta fifteen minute "keynote" (product pitch) do your prep work so you look good on stage. The Plum guy was good, but despite having some really cool ideas, the EVDB guy presented really poorly. The ideas were cool, but good gracious, be ready for your talk!
Joel Spolsky's talk was great. He is perhaps more caustic in person than on the web. I have a different proposal for why everyone uses blue and green on their sites, however -- it is because those two colors represent about 70% (this statistic is vaguely remembered, but technically made up, if I had bandwidth I'd go find a source, oh well) of people's favorite colors. Blue is the most common favorite color, green is the next most common. People always tend towards blue and green. Arial, also, isn't used because it is used at Google, but because it is a font which renders well in most browsers (thank you Microsoft) and most importantly, is on basically every computer connected to the intertron.
I want to look at Plum to see how they are going to manage the exponential endpint problem. The EVDB sticker and demand stuff is validation of another idea, that embedded badges are the api's of the masses.