Convention Camp 2011: the summary

Today the third edition of the Convention Camp took place at the Hannover fair center. Around 1.500 visitors came to see loads of sessions – planned and spontaneous. The topics reached from SEO stuff over content topics to also some, but very little, ecommerce. So much for facts.

Now the personal view (and yes: I just visited some sessions, so I might just picked the wrong ones): My feeling was, that the focus of the conference was quite unclear. The conference wants to be the internet (un)conference. But the session topics were wide spreded and some of them were quite marketing driven. Also they missed real innovative or disruptive topics (which I expected from a future talk), nor a specialized focus on internet (apart from the usual SEO and social media stuff…). So a good part of the day felt a lot like “I’ve heard this before”.

Highlight was for sure German science fiction author Frank Schätzing, who talked about future rumors. The session was entertaining and interesting. Also the payed content session was interesting, thanks to the committed speakers and the session about how to NOT sell stuff in your shop. So basically I’m left with mixed feelings – some good, some bad parts. I really hope next year the focus will be set more clearly to make this conference a “must be there” on the calendar again.

As a result: I met nice people, had good conversations, we had good food and thanks to Frank Schätzing I now know how sex in space works :-)