Confabb - one stop conference shop
Just stumbled across a nifty new site called Confabb, which launched a few days ago.
From the About page:
Confabb (confabb.com) combines an aggregate database of major conferences, conventions, and trade shows sorted by industry with social networking tools designed to empower conference attendees to improve their overall experience.
There are more than 16,000 conference loaded and ready to go. Intrigued, I looked up the SLA 2007 conference, and sure enough, there it was! (Lucky me got to be the first to sign up as “attending”.) I looked at the page for a conference called Web Directions North that my friend Laurel’s going to in February, and there were three people already watching that one. BCLA 2007 isn’t up yet, nor is CALL 2007. The categorisation tool is wonky, which they admit and claim they are working on.
Basically, each conference has a homepage with various tabs including details, sessions, speakers, reviews, discussion, photos, news, and events. You can sign up as “attending” or “watching” or “speaking at” a conference, and from there grab RSS feeds for each conference. In the press release, they suggest people will be able to use it to research past conferences - check out attendee ratings on food, swag (STUFF WE ALL GET!), etc. What’s really neat is that where available, the conference tag is listed, and users are reminded to use the tag in their blog posts and photos for ease of aggregating.
So far as I can tell, Confabb has huge potential to be a one-stop-shop for conference-goers and conference-would-goers. I love the idea of “watching” a conference that you can’t go to but are interested in.
It’s early days, so it doesn’t look like there are many users yet. I’m curious to see how well Confabb will do, and a little skeptical, in light of many conferences having their own sites and officials blogs, but still, it’s a very, very cool idea!