A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to spend a few days in Silicon Valley.  It was my second visit out there in the last two years, and was a lot of fun.

I went to the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose, where I gave a presentation on Universal Search and Blended search from Google, Yahoo, and Ask.com.  The conference lasted a week, and was a lot of fun.  The weekend before the conference, I attended barcampblock, a barcamp "unconference" happening in Palo Alto, and was joined by around 500 other participants who discussed a great number of topics, including many involving social networking and blogging. 

There are a lot of free or inexpensive gatherings involving technology, and some great presentations from places like Stanford University (in Palo Alto).  I wish more happened on the East Coast like that.

I did get to go to podcamp philly this past weekend, and the experience leads me to believe that there may be more going on in the tech field in Philadephia than I thought.  I was beginning to think that I might have to move to the West coast to gain exposure to the kind of interactivity that I experienced this weekend in the tech field.  Maybe I don't.