Rockin' the Trade Show

Spent a couple hours wandering the trade show floor and the arcade floor. Here's the rule of thumb: If you want to draw a crowd, have Guitar Hero. People will gather. They will stand. They will stare dumbfounded as if they've never seen it before. There must have been 20 Guitar Hero setups around the place. The only thing that drew more people was when the Sapient booth announced over the loudspeaker that they were giving away free beer.

Saw a couple of interesting things on the trade floor. Make Magazine had some interesting stuff going on. It's a little bit like ReadyMade but a little different and still cool.

Also, I've been complaining for a little while that I can't keep up with all the social websites and that someone needs to make a social site aggregator--something to take all your social website (myspace, friendster, LinkdIn, Flikr) profiles and combine them onto one page. Social Thing is just that. I haven't been on the site to check it out, but in theory it sounds like a good idea.

Met a guy from a company called Creative Commons that lets people upload photos, videos, artwork, etc., then set the level of legal use they'll allow (from "Anything, as long as you give me credit" to all rights reserved). Anyway, it seemed like a good resource for comps, internal videos, etc.

Other than that, the trade show had a bunch of state and city film commissions, and about 9,000 booths for new social networking sites. I was looking for the booth where you throw the rings onto the bottles and win a stuffed tiger, but I couldn't find one.