The annual O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2005 kicked off with workshops today in San Diego, California. The bad news is that it's starting to look more serious and more corporate, rather than being the splendid geek-fest of old. Nokia has appeared as the Diamond Sponsor and is hosting a reception tomorrow evening. AT&T, Yahoo!, Microsoft Research and Apple Developer Connection are the Platinum Sponsors, so the multibillion multinational corporations are emerging in force.
A quick skim through the list of attendees also suggests the mainstream press will be here, too. The names include Reuters (Eric Auchard), The Washington Post (Ed Holzinger), Newsweek (Steven Levy), The New York Times (John Markoff), Forbes (Victoria Murphy), and Fortune (Fred Vogelstein), plus people from Ziff and CNet. Hmm, what happened to The Wall Street Journal, Business Week and The Economist? Keeping their attendance secret, or asleep at the wheel?
Still, there are probably enough of the right sort of speaker to maintain the proper flavour. Examples include Stewart Butterfield of Flickr, Tom Coates from the BBC, Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing), Danny O'Brien (NTK), and Clay Shirky (that's in alphabetical order). Plus the inestimable David Weinberger to blog the whole thing at Joho (see link, left, under People).
