I just awoke from a nap.

I’m not a big afternoon napper, but I gotta tell you, the FlashForward conference in San Francisco really took it out of me. Busy days spent in inspriring sessions and working the Disney.com lounge, and busy nights spent in the finest late night establishments in San Francisco.

They changed the format of the conference pretty heavily this year. This is my first time at FlashForward, but it was pretty clear that the format was unlike anything else, except maybe TED, which I heard was the inspiration behind FlashForward’s single-track style. Each session was approximately twenty minutes, save some keynotes.

I’m not the best critic of FlashForward’s new style because this was my first year, but I can pretty easily imagine how much it has changed, if it was anything like other conferences. It’s nice to have something that’s different. Heavy coding sessions don’t play out well in 20 minutes, so speakers spent their time inspiring us with nuggets of wisdom rather than nuggets of ActionScript.

I spent some of my time working at the Disney.com lounge, so I didn’t get to go to every session. But of course, if I went to every session, then I wouldn’t get to spend some of my time working at the Disney.com lounge, so it was a good trade off. Needless to say, I missed some great speakers, notably BitchWhoCodes, who I heard found the perfect balance between being informative and comedic (aka entertaining).

I was able to attend about two-thirds of the sessions. It’s hard to pick favorites, but I would have to say that I was the most captivated by David Carson, who showed his print design portfolio, and of course, Erik Natzke. Erik showed us a timeline of his work, sometimes taking us through iterations of the same piece. He seems pretty disciplined at saving out his work in several stages, probably with these conferences in mind. I’ve only heard him speak a few times, but I noticed that he showed less of his ad portfolio (which is quite impressive) and more of his art. It’s great to see someone who is so successful and respected start out doing simple ad work, and slowly move into their passion over the years. It’s inspiring.

Word on the street is that Disney threw a bumpin’ party last year. This year’s party wasn’t sponsored by anyone except the conference itself. This meant no drink tickets, but the important guys had drink bracelets, which gave us all double-incentive to go up and meet them. I had a good time at the parties, but I left with my thoughts lingering more on the sessions than the drinks, which means that FlashForward 2008 was a success in my mind.

In fear of coming off completely starry-eyed about all of FlashForward, I feel like I should say something critical of the conference. While I really liked it’s single-track, no-code method, part of me feels like FlashForward’s new format is better left for conferences with a broader scope, like TED. Companies pay a lot of money to send their employees across the country to bring back some new knowledge of Flash as a tool. This format makes that difficult, and I think that these companies will be disappointed by the change.

While it can be argued that it’s more beneficial for us to come home with inspiration, motivation, and a new burst of creativity, I believe most of that newfound creative energy will be channelled into personal projects rather than company projects. I think we’re going to see attendees enjoy the new format more than the companies that are sending them.

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Saw this comment on a news.com post, and thought it was right on:

We are only kidding ourselves if we think we can live in a world where our actions are not tracked. Information about personal activity is the grease that keeps our information economy humming. Knowing what you buy, where you shop, what you watch is the only way to keep our economy efficient and our prosperity growing. I am tracked every time I buy something — I use my credit card. I am tracked even as I write this sentence. If I weren’t tracked in this way, our information economy would collapse under its own inefficiency. Instead of pretending we can avoid being tracked, we should have a conversation about how to track activity in an open, ethical way that does not get in the way of free market competition.

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