Martin Spedding wonders "Was going to the PDC really worth it?" and Scoble sez "I'd say there's a huge amount of value in actually being there" via [The Scobleizer Weblog]
Spedding essentially says that he goes to the PDC to "get an edge" and, now that conferences put up presentations online, he thinks that value is being diminished. Over the past 14 years, I've decided that presentations are the least valuable part of any conference. Honestly, Microsoft's emphasis on text-heavy slides interspersed with demos and "you wanna' see some code?" is much better marketing than pedagogy: "Wow, I'm getting substance! Oh, it's real! Gosh, that looks easy! Umm...what's code-beside again?"
Having said that, the PDC's "Ask the Experts" sessions were fantastic. There were literally hundreds of Redmondians sitting around, eager to talk. And if the person you were talking to didn't quite know, they'd raise their head and ask the right person "Hey, Jane, is it possible to do...?" You can't duplicate that online.
To me, the ideal conference would be one where the presentations were made available to attendees the week prior to the conference and when the session is scheduled, attendees walked into a ZeroConf WiFi lillypad that provided a shared workspace with the tools available and the presenters first words were "So. How did the exercises go?"