I received a few e-mails this morning from people interested in how Widgets Live! came together. Yep, the event really was planned in about a month, from site selection to the actual day-long event. In this post I’ll outline how Widgets Live! grew from an idea to an in-person event.
- July 12
- Coming up short on ideas for my weekly podcast with Om Malik, I suggested we talk about widgets and how they are changing web publishing. I had been playing around with widgets as a form of web feed syndication, specifically thinking of performance on Live.com and other views into a central syndication back-end. I saw a bit of this distribution at Technorati as out content placed on lots of small sites (tag links, favorites, mini etc.) helped distribute incoming sources of traffic and make the data users care about more portable.
- July 15
- I published some thoughts on the Widgetization of the Web to accompany the podcast.
- September 11
- Om publishes an article on widgets as the subject of his first Business 2.0 column. The article includes conversations with some of the new startups focused on widgets.
- September 18
Dare Obasanjo is a bit frustrated with the conference scene and wishes he had somewhere to go to talk about micro applications like widgets.
Over dinner Om and I talk about Dare’s post, conferences, and the hotness of the widgets topic.
Later that night Om posted to his side blog contemplating an “informal event to talk widgets.”
- Last week of September
- Deciding whether or not we wanted to invest the time and effort needed to make the conference a success.
- First week of October
- Decided November 6 would be the ideal date for the conference to allow people in town for the Web 2.0 Summit to extend their stay and release product before the onslaught of press releases issued at the bigger conference. Next up came finding a venue and other early implementation details needed to announce the event.
- October 10
- WidgetsLive.com is launched and the event announced on my blog. Ticket sales begin and sponsors solidify their interest. We wanted to announce before the video search panel Om and I were moderating that evening in Mountain View.
- October 12
- Om announces the event on GigaOM. I had posted a rough schedule to the conference website by this point and started filling in speakers.
- November 1
- The conference is sold out!
- November 6
- The conference kicks off at 8 a.m. with over 200 attendees in attendance.
There was about a 4-month gap between talking about doing a podcast on something I’d been slacking on writing up for a while to hosting a conference bringing together major players in the industry. An initial attempt at lazy blogging became a lot of work in the end, but it was fun. Ha!