You can read my official LinuxWorld recap over at the Rackspace blog. Consider this post the “cutting room floor” - things that wouldn’t have made sense to post on the Rackspace blog. Enjoy!

• Are tech conferences dying? Attendance this year is noticeably lower than previous years. In fact, attendance over the past 5 years seems to be at an extremely downward angle, leading me to believe that the decline in attendance has less to do with the current economy, and more to do with some other factor. You could also see the scaling down of the expo floor. Companies that used to have massive booths now have relatively modest setups.
• Possibly related to the item above (and possibly the cause of it), the number of marquee names appearing at the conference has taken a drastic turn downwards. A few years back, the conference lineup read like a veritable “who’s who” of the open-source community. This year, the only big names that are appearing seem to be localized to the Golden Penguin trivia conference, moderated by Jeremy Allison of Samba.
• The death of conference shwag is very real. Years ago, you needed to buy a second suitcase just to transport all of the shirts, nerf balls, pens, and other marketing items. This year, the trend is split two ways. The first is the whole “attend our 30 minute sales pitch, and you’ll get a shirt after.” I personally hate this approach - listen, I don’t care about your HBA cards that much. The second trend is giving away a bigger prize via a contest or raffle. I personally like the contest approach - there was a “Open Source Idol” dance competition, a make-your-own Dilbert comic contest (more on that later), a mechanical bull, and of course, the Rackspace break-fix competition.
• Dice.com was sponsoring a make your own Dilbert cartoon contest. Essentially, you came up with a punchline, chose one of three backgrounds, and were green-screened into the comic saying your punchline. This was actually pretty tricky, because it is hard to deliver a punchline in a single speech-bubble without any setup. I spent a few minutes coming up with mine, which ended up as one of the winners. I’ll post the comic when I get back home, because it’s hard to explain the punchline without seeing the visuals. My prize was a copy of Scott Adam’s latest book, signed by the author with a hand-drawn sketch of Dogbert inside. Pretty cool.
• There are a TON of hardware vendors here, most of whom are selling fairly mundane items like Host Bus Adapters and Raid Controllers. Not surprisingly, most of these booths look like a ghost-town. Wrong audience.
• Speaking of wrong audience … the New York Times has a booth here for some befuddling reason. It’s actually a bit of an anachronism - I heard multiple people responding to their sales pitch with, “Wait, you want me to pay for news? Let me tell you about this thing called the internet …”
• Lots of vendors seemed very, very interested in talking to me when they heard I was from Rackspace. I won’t name names, but at one booth, two sales people and a sales engineer were asking me if I could get them jobs!
• The keynotes really illustrate how much attendance is down. You used to have to line up 20 minutes ahead of time to get a decent seat in a keynote. Now they are being held in rooms half the size, with the entire back half roped off. I strolled in to one keynote right before it started, and managed to get a seat front and center with no one sitting within three seats on either side of me.
• Attendance in the sessions is equally sparse. Honestly, I think that the fact that there are ten different tracks at this conference is a bad idea with attendance down so much compared to previous years. There are more tracks now than in the hey-day of LinuxWorld, even though attendance seems to have decreased dramatically.
• I’m not just saying this because I work with him - I really enjoyed John Engates‘ presentation. It was really useful stuff, and the audience really seemed to be engaged. I saw a lot of people scribbling notes on everything he said.
• The WiFi at this conference is being provided by Xirrus, whose tagline is “High Performance WiFi”. I’m finding it relatively hit or miss. 10 minutes ago, I was getting ping time to Google in the 1000 ms range. Now, I’m seeing 50 ms pings. When it’s working, it flies, but when it isn’t, I’m getting better speeds using my BlackBerry as a modem over Sprint’s network.

I should have some pictures loaded to my Flickr account in the next couple days. In them, you can definitely see the difference in attendance between this year, and just a couple years back.