2006 O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference: The Attention Economy

I'm starting to look around for some conferences to attend. I want something different, that has the prospect of allowing me to learn something that I can't learn by reading web sites and online PDFs. And I certainly want to do a lot of networking. One possibility is the 2006 O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference to be held March 6-9, 2006 at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego, California, which is focusing on what is called the Attention Economy.

Here's O'Reilly's summary description:

Today's consumer technology breaks focus rather than facilitating it, peppering us with pleas and offerings by dozens of applications competing for our attention. Not to mention the overwhelming amount of data we produce and consume every day. No longer constrained by any virtual limits, we're feeling the effects of this flood of digital assets . It's in our inboxes and news aggregators, on our hard drives and iPods, overloading our very capacity for managing it all. As organic creatures with fallible and finite perception systems, complex desires, and an ever-decreasing amount of time, how do we attenuate the flow to allow for synthesis and reflection?

This year's edition of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference explores the applications and services, interface overhauls and algorithmic underpinnings, technological hacks and etiquette tweaks of what we call the Attention Economy.

You'll find these themes reflected in ETech's roll-up-your-sleeves tutorials, meaty and to-the-point plenary presentations, and real world focused breakout sessions, spilling out into the hallway conversations of hackers and luminaries.

ETech shines a light on the innovations coming from non-traditional sources in an effort to get them on to everybody's radar. While the initial impact of these innovations may seem small, their ripple effects can have a huge impact in the larger computing arena. What you touch at ETech, you'll be using in the products, applications, and services of tomorrow.

In short, to build the future you have to be there.

Sounds quite interesting, but here's the catch: The conference registration fee is now $1,645, which is far, far beyond my budget and my financial ability. Maybe next year, probably never.

Query for my readers: Do you know anybody who will be attending the conference? And, how do so many people manage to afford such an expensive conference in these days of ultra-tight budgets?

-- Jack Krupansky