Amen to ETech

Interesting that Joel is taking his entire team to ETech this year. I’ve been to every O’Reilly conference in the last three years save EuroOSCON and the defunct Bioinformatics. ETech is consistently the most interesting and fun. Apparently Joel gave his team a choice of conferences and they all chose ETech. Good for them.

I did overhear someone at Web 2.0 claim that they hadn’t told anyone that they were at the conference because they considered the trip a competitive advantage. My guess is that Joel feels the opposite, publicly acknowledging his team’s intentions gives him an advantage when it comes to recruiting and retention.

I guess openness is one of the Web 2.0 virtues that not everyone at Web 2.0 understands.