I’m pleased to announce that James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, and Gartner Research Vice President Whit Andrews will be keynoting the Mark Logic User Conference in San Francisco on May 12-14, 2009.
The Wisdom of Crowds was a seminal book in the movement to Web 2.0, articulating the rationale for one core Web 2.0 concept (i.e., “harnessing collective intelligence”) and popularizing ideas such as prediction markets like Intrade. In addition, Surowiecki is a staff writer at The New Yorker, writing a column entitled The Financial Page and a blog called The Balance Sheet. I’m very much looking forward to seeing him speak.
Speaking of which, I’ve seen Whit Andrews speak several times and he is one of the industry’s foremost thinkers on search and information retrieval technologies. Whit is a delightful, thought-provoking speaker with a practical bent that comes from his daily interactions with companies that use search-related technologies to build both internal and customer-facing applications that leverage document content and other sources of unstructured information. Whit maintains an excellent blog at Gartner’s blog network site, which you can find here.
I look forward to seeing you at the conference. I know this won’t be the easiest year to get travel approvals so please take a few steps to ensure you can attend if you want to:
- Book early: this will reduce your costs.
- Submit a talk. If accepted, it will get you a free conference registration.
- Book in groups: I think there’s a discount for so doing.
- Negotiate with your management. If you attend only one conference this year, make this one it.
- Combine the trip with a vacation. California’s great in May and maybe your boss will split the airfare.
- Let us know if you’re stuck. Tell your account manager (or me via this blog) and we’ll try to brainstorm ways to help.
Again, I look forward to seeing you all and I know that the keynotes alone can justify the business value of attending the event.
1 response so far ↓
1 Daniel Tunkelang // Feb 5, 2009 at 11:00 am
How timely of me to post about The Banality of Crowds this morning!
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