Linking to Niall Kennedy's blog reminded me that I owed him an email response to a question he asked about a month ago. The question asked what I thought about the diversity of speakers at the Widgets Live conference given my comments on the topic in my blog post entitled Who Attends 'Web 2.0' Conferences. 

After thinking about it off and on for a month, I realize that I liked the conference primarily because of its content and focus. The speakers weren't the usual suspects you see at Web conferences nor were they homogenous in gender and ethnic background. I assume the latter is a consequence of the fact that the conference was about concrete technical topics as opposed to a gathering to gab with the hip Web 2.0 crowd which meant that the people who actually build stuff were there...and guess what they aren't all caucasian males in their 20s to 30s, regardless of how much conferences like The Future of Web Apps and Office 2.0 pretend otherwise.

This is one of the reasons I decided to pass on the Web 2.0 conference this year. It seems I may have made the right choice given John Battelle's comments on the fact that a bunch of the corporate VP types that spoke at the conference ended up losing their jobs the next week. ;)