In the last few years, I've been making a very conscious effort to attend and speak at a variety of conferences both within the Flash world and in the greater world of web development, web standards, and open source. This has meant that in the last year or so alone, I got to opportunity to present to plethora of different audiences at conferences as diverse as MacWorld, Wizards of OS, Flash on the Beach, and d.construct. XTech, however, was very different to any of my previous conference experiences and I have to thank Jeremy for suggesting that I speak at it. (Jeremy also live-blogged several of the sessions from the conference and you can find several of the session slides online at SlideShare.)

XTech, at its birth, was a conference about XML. Although, as I understand it, the focus of the conference has shifted somewhat in recent years to embrace other web technologies and the crazy/sexy world of Web 2.0. Shifts in focus notwithstanding, I still had the pleasure of meeting and conversing with delegates from a variety of interest areas that I hadn't had the chance to at previous conferences, from people who make dictionaries to government representatives.

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My friend and fellow Brightoner Simon Willison of Django/OpenID fame has just released a lovely little mashup called wikinear that uses FireEagle and Wikipedia to show you Wikipedia articles that are relevant to your current location.

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Now that I'm back from SWSX, somewhat over my jetlag, and BarcampBrighton2 is over, I'm looking forward to a few weeks of productive work in Brighton.

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