Even with all of the advances in technology, meeting people in real life can be quite invigorating, useful, and fun, but finding out which conferences and events are going on in the industry can be a struggle at best.

As part of my job, I will be required to attend events related to blogging, new media, Web 2.0, and similar circles. I am also trying to convince them that it would be great if I could attend events that bloggers will attend that aren’t necessarily related to blogging, but finding anything, even related to blogging is more difficult than I thought it would be.

Sure, finding conferences like Gnomedex, Mesh and other big name events isn’t that difficult, but finding events with less than a thousand people seems next to impossible unless you know someone that knows about it.

Even Northern Voice and Mesh weren’t on my radar until a friend mentioned them, and that isn’t the way it should be.

Where is the ultimate list of conferences and events for us geeks? Where do I need to be in the upcoming year? Upcoming and other such tools aren’t good enough as they don’t let me know about things I might be interested in. I have to still search them out based on certain criteria. Not only that, but they don’t have “every” event listed on their site. I need a central repository of all the conferences and events from small to large that relate to my field.

I tried asking the people following me on Twitter, but only received three responses, one of which included a conference that won’t be happening this year. What a sad state of affairs.

Originally posted on May 15, 2008 @ 3:28 pm