Ok, after three days of session after session, bad WiFi following bad WiFi, XTECH has finally come to an end. My general thoughts are positive but with some reservations.
I enjoyed some of the presentations' topics but mostly I was interested enough in those topics that the presentation did not have much added value anymore. Most of the presentations were bird's eye views of the topic.
I also saw a couple of presentations that were really too boring to sit through. The presentation quality in this field seems to be quite widely distributed.
One thing I couldn't help noticing was that any time a presentation would be about the semantic web[1], the average age in the room would rise with at least 10 years. I don't know if these people haven't figured out that if nobody is using their technology after a couple of decades, than maybe it might not be that big an hit.
Let's get out of the semantic web and into quick and dirty semantics.
It was very interesting and cool to see and talk to people whose writings I am already very familiar with. Seeing the real faces behind the blogs and the passion for the topics is inspiring.
[1] Presentations concerning the semantic web can be easily recognized because they have the acronym RDF somewhere in the description.