[via Napsterization ]:

I know of no other conference that holds speaker sessions (there may be some but I've never heard of it, so please leave comments if there are some). Almost all the speakers came, and the presentations by Elisa Camahort and Lisa Stone were great. I'll update this post with notes from Donna's post, but frankly, every conference I attend could use something like this, were the organizers give the results of the survey from attendees as they registered (context about who's coming and what they care about.. talk about knowing your audience), common sense tips about speaking and the guidelines for running sessions.

I've spoken at my fair share of conferences (I'm in Portland for OSCON), but I've never seen anything like this. And its way overdue, because lots of conference talks could use improvement. If we have to have the traditional speakerful conference format, at least we can work on improving the quality of the speaking.