The Game Conference Conglomerate Feed of Awesomeness

I’ve been nagging game developers to writeup every game-conference session they go to, and blog it. I think this will serve a bunch of extremely valuable purposes, including:

• make sure that good talks and speakers get their work indexed by google; google isn’t great at finding stuff inside Powerpoint slides, and conferences only have a 30%-60% hit rate on managing to get the slides online anyway!
• provide rich, public, feedback on what’s both good and bad in talks, making it easier for ALL speakers to improve their technique and content choices in future.
• get the honest feedback of industry insiders on what people are saying and doing at conferences, instead of only getting the opinions of journalists and players. Most of us in the industry have lots of extra non-public information about the context of what people are or should be doing. We can’t necessarily say that explicitly, but we can let it inform our judgements and intrepretations of what people say and present.

Darius agreed this was a Good Idea, and at this week’s conference he took it one further: he’s made a feed aggregation so that all of us who do this can have our posts AUTOMATICALLY pulled together into one single RSS stream. Cool!

FYI, this was done in Yahoo Pipes, and is a great example of what you can do with things like Y!Pipes – you have an idea of stuff you want to pull together that would have taken maybe 15 minutes of coding, and half an hour of putting scripts up on a server etc, etc, etc – so you’d never get around to implementing it because it’s just *slightly* too much effort for the perceived instantaneous value. But with Y!P, this would have taken Darius seconds (not even minutes) to set up – and you can even see the filter he made, as a graphical flowchart whose code you can one-click steal and re-use yourself (it’s on the LHS navbar at the link above!)

We will *definitely* be doing this for future conferences – and continuing to recruit more game industry people (and anyone else who attends the conferences – all writeups welcome!) to the conglomerate. For now, send your blog address and conference tag to Darius.