ApacheCon: Brutal honesty

I ventured away from Comdex for a while this afternoon to visit ApacheCon, a convention staged by the Apache Software Foundation, the group that supports the open-source community responsible for such programs as the market-leading Apache Web server. I arrived in time to hear the second half of the keynote speech by Chris Pirillo, who runs the Lockergnome Web site and co-wrote "Online! The Book" with John C. Dvorak of PC Magazine.

Pirillo gave what I thought was an enjoyable speech, talking extensively about RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds and news aggregators, the method of reading RSS feeds from weblogs and news sites. (By the way, you can get the RSS feed for this site by clicking on the XML logo on the right over there.) Toward the end he also showed off the capabilities of Feedster, a weblog search engine, by using it to search for recent posts related to ApacheCon.

In fact, Pirillo specifically searched Feedster for an ApacheCon post he had noticed previously. As it turned out, it wasn't exactly a public relations coup for the conference. This was the post he showed, by a blogger named Blair:

I cannot emphasize strongly enough how much I dislike Las Vegas and am bored with ApacheCon 2003. The biggest challenge so far has been keeping myself from packing up and heading back to the airport and then flying back to Chicago.

It could have been worse. Here is a subsequent post by the same blogger, under the heading, "ApacheCon Attendees":

No question. I hate these people far more than I hate Las Vegas. And considering the state that I have been in since arriving in Las Vegas, that is saying a lot.

Actually, for Pirillo, it could have been even worse than that. Here's a post someone made about his presentation:

who invited chris pirillo to keynote at apachecon? the first 21 minutes, he talked about himself, and finally reached his premise after 37 minutes even though it was immediately apparent. give me a break.

Lastly, I leave you with one word of advice: If ever you have a chance to attend an open-source software conference, don't introduce yourself to anyone as the Microsoft beat reporter for a Seattle paper. Doesn't exactly get the conversation off to a roaring start.

Posted by Todd Bishop at November 18, 2003 07:33 PM