I'm long overdue in blogging about DefragCon and BlogWorldExpo. My apologies to the organizers, both events were great.

DefragCon was in Denver, Nov 5-6. Eric Norlin did an amazing job putting this together. The event had quite the attendee and speakers list. You couldn't spit and not hit an industry notable. The sessions were mostly interesting. I spoke on a panel about socializing the enterprise alongside Charles Armstrong of Trampoline Systems and Dawn Foster of Jive Software. I attempted to attend the speaker's dinner, but was…errr…shall we say persuaded not to by the competitor who was sponsoring it. I met Alex Iskold in person. He's the guy who's been writing the informed articles at Read/WriteWeb about the semantic web. He's also the founder of AdaptiveBlue. I was present at the time he conceived the very innovative and provocative ClosedPrivate Initiative. I've since contributed to the initiative's blog. I facilitated an Open Space session on joining disparate pieces. I intended this to be a discussion about why open APIs, open standards, and surfacing (approved) user data is a good thing. Dawn was present, a guy from Me.dium was there, as was a the CTO from CollectiveX. I don't recall who else, sorry. The Open Space sessions really didn't work at DefragCon. If only Kaliya were there.

BlogWorldExpo was in Las Vegas, Nov 8-9. Rick Calvert and Dave Cynkin are the guys who organized this. They are wonderful. They too managed to organize a long list of notables. MindTouch powered the site wiki. Some highlights? Lijit, AdapativeBlue, Pajamas Media party, Pajamas Media booth masseuse, meeting Leo Laporte, drinking with the dudes from WordPress, and the fact that MindTouch's rabbits were everywhere. 

Both were great events. Both were inaugural events. I plan to attend both next year.