Tomorrow MESH 2.0 kicks off. I have to admit to being more than a little curious about what great ideas will surface this year. Last year I live blogged the conference. I might do a little of that this year but I really want to take the time to dive into MESH's zeitgeist a bit more. Until then, here are some thoughts from last year's MESH by RadiantCore's Jay Goldman:

I asked some audience members to send me their thoughts on the conference for posting on Gagglescape. Jay Goldman of RadiantCore, one of the BarCampTdot organizers, offered the following:

Some thoughts on Mesh:

- I've been to many conferences that were planned in much longer amounts of time, most of which where chaotic and disappointing. Stuart, Rob, Mark, Mike, and Matthew did a wonderful job of pulling together an informative and interactive two days in a remarkably short amount of time.

- The network connectivity, especially on day one when they had many of the ports blocked, could have been much better. Conferences for the tech crowd need gobs and gobs of bandwidth almost before they need anything else.

- The mix of tech and marketing folk was fantastic and made for some excellent networking. The two sides of the fence are often divided by great chasms where collaboration and mutual respect go to die. Mesh really helped to build some bridges, at least in the Toronto area.

- I liked the mixed streams of sessions because it made it easier to plan my day.  It would have been interesting to also cross the streams and have some panels made up of marketers and technologists -for example, I would definitely have attended a debate between Steve Rubel and Chris Messina on the relative merits of blogging as a marketing and information distribution mechanism.

- MaRS is a great venue for events like this and I hope we see more of them held there! The staff were really helpful and I overhead offers to make special meals for some of my vegetarian colleagues, which is a rare show of service.

- The revised schedule (vs. the original in HTML on the website) had the advantage of a few additional sessions, but the disadvantage of being more confusing. A lot of people didn't notice that there were some time slots with four sessions in them and assumed it was two slots of two each, thereby missing some interesting content. Although I'm sure it was a big plus for some participants to have all of the Media and Society streams on one day and the Marketing Business on the second, it also meant that there where a few slots in which there were competing sessions. 

- I echo the comments made by some of the Mesh detractors that it would have been nice to see a more even representation of the sexes in terms of the selected speakers. There are lots of women doing interesting things in both tech and marketing and, although I applaud the inclusion of well known figures like Tara and Amber, I think there are plenty of other candidates who could have been invited.

- One of my favourite sessions was Tara's keynote on PInko Marketing because she came down off the stage and involved the room. Some of the other keynotes did a great job of taking questions from the audience (Steve Rubel's discussion on character blogs comes to mind), while other sessions ended up being more about the stage and less about participation. I found the greatest value in hearing not just from the "chosen few" but also from the many experts in attendance (Tara's reference to the James Surowiecki's Wisdom of Crowds about experts becoming talking heads and losing their touch ringing in my head).