1.	In no more than a couple of years, probably a lot less, conferences will seek out people who write weblogs to broaden the reach of their conferences. The logic is simple. If I give a speech at a conference, in the old model, I can speak to a few hundred people for a few minutes, and convey a small bit of what I know, and influence them for a short time, until the next speaker takes the stage. However, if a discussion starts with my presentation, and a record is created on the public Web, and linked to by weblogs, and indexed by the major search engines, all of a sudden I have a chance to create news when I give a speech. This increases the value of the conference for everyone who participates.
2.	For the next couple of years, the news coming out of conferences will be the new technology. We have a lot of catching up to do. People generally don't know that there are new tools, as fundamental and empowering as word processors were in the early 80s. And aggregation software that can merge many flows into one, so you never have to go looking for what's new. That point came home last week. The market is just waking up. The tools vendors, including my company, are way ahead of most users.
3.	I've said this many times before, but it bears repeating in this context. Press conferences should include users to report to other users, without middlemen. We've seen a bit of this in Macromedia's adoption of weblog technology to create flow directly from internal Macromedia developers to users, but the flow must also work in the reverse direction. Include users in your idea of what the press is, listen, and tune your message, and your marketing automatically gets more efficient. There's not much time to waste, professional journalists are learning about and adopting the new technology. Any technology vendor that isn't also using these techniques to market is going to wake up in a very strange world in a couple of quarters.