Online Rocks Because You Can Attend – Without Attending

I get very excited about opportunities to attend conferences (even more-so if I’m speaking). I’m all about learning and growing. I got an email blast from AlwaysOn and saw that the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit (which, hey, if I had the funds… I’d hit that) starts this week. Even better, they are feeding it live via webcast over the Net.
How great is that?
In the past few months, I’ve had similar experiences with BloggerCon (which I attended in Second Life) and Gnomedex (both of those were audio only – but beggars can’t be choosers).
I also recently watched a bunch of videocasts from the TED Talks – Anthony Robbins, Al Gore and more.
Video streaming a conference is killer. The true value of buying a ticket, attending in person and all of the good networking can never be compared to watching it stream over the web – it’s not even a close second – but content is content (see my “beggars” comment above).
Everyone talks about how proper broadband video is the last mile for the Internet. The way social media is unfolding, I don’t think we’re all that thrilled with just laying back and watching a stream of video on our monitors, but as social media blends with video content… watch out (clue: YouTube is not even close to where this going to go).
There was nothing like listening to BloggerCon in Second Life while chatting with some fellow Avatars from all over the world at Koz‘s Podcast.com RSS Platform.
Check out The AlwaysOn Stanford Summit video stream here.