Sorry I missed your show. How'd it go? Any tips on keeping an audience engaged for 3.5 hours?

Sorry I missed your tutorial! I'm stuck at work but hope to get an afternoon session in today. I went yesterday for an Adobe thing but the most glaring aspect was: what a DEAD show!!

Compared to the seybolds of just a few years ago, this one is lean and mean. Not such a great sign of the times, ya know?

bret

The show is dead, but I have to say that Seybold seems to be reinterpreting what "Publishing" means: this show is all about PDF, my workshop aside. I'd agree that the poor attendance is a sign of the times except Oracle World, adjacent in the main Moscone Center, is mobbed, and I keep hearing about how Linux and Open Source conferences are exceeding their attendence projections. So perhaps it's not that economies are dead, but that Seybold is unable to identify its key constituency and as a result is running a trivialized show?

Btw, my workshop went well, from what feedback I've received. About 60 people in attendance, and only two left during the 4 hour command line geek marathon! Brian's second part workshop this morning had a sparser attendence (about 25?) but was also well received.

Dave,

So do you think that 'publishing' is changing? I sure do. Working in digital prepress I've seen, since the dot.com bust, our business suffer - we're leaner and meaner now, too! I think stuff like blogging and xml and content management are supplanting some of the 'traditional' publishing that many have grown accustomed to. Hopefully, my company will roll with the changes and not let the 'new' things pass us by.

It's just very depressing seeing the sparseness of the show compared the 'back in the day'.

BTW, nice blog, Dave!

Thanks for your note and kudos, Bret! I've thought about this a lot and I believe that as the economy gets tighter, people focus more on WHAT they're doing rather than HOW they're doing it. So a conference like Seybold is missing the point: people aren't focused on the tools, they're trying to more and more focus on what they're using the tools to accomplish.

But, yeah, I miss the glory days of conferences and bursting exhibit halls with tons of cool giveaways. This conference, the only neato giveaway were pens from Google. I got two. :-)

I agree - any good business should focus on the end user's experience, not the tool itself. In fact, the better the tool the more it disappears from concious thought.

I couldn't agree with you more, Aaron. That was my motivation in writing the Unix email program 'elm' almost twenty years ago (gad! I'm that old?). I wanted a program that let me focus on the content, not the mechanism. McLuhan would be proud!

Hi Dave, have you seen or heard of that lawsuit by RR Donnely against Quark and Kodak/Creo. I was wondering what you thought about it and how it will affect Creo customers. I have an HP Indigo and we are concerned how this will affect our use of the software in question YTD sold to us by HP, was dev by Quark. Not sure if you remember me, it's me michelle, met you about a year ago. C ya.