Years ago, I used to attend tech conferences (Microsoft, San Francisco, etc) and also was a presenter (SAP, Oracle, Las Vegas, etc). With that said, I believe attending a conference in person is not as necessary these days because many of them will have recorded videos.<p>One can watch recorded videos at 2x or even 3x accelerated speed. One can also fast-forward past the slow typing, the slow talkers etc.<p>If one wants to go because of in-person networking opportunities, or physically touch some new gadgets (e.g. Microsoft Surface table, etc) that's understandable. However, if one's primary takeaway from conferences is quantity & density of tech information, the conference videos are much more effective for that. For example, O'Reilly sells video packages for something like $499 which is much less than the cost of the registration fee + travel expenses. Microsoft makes their conference videos free on channel9. It's more information for less money; a win-win.
Talks being presented by one person is key. Large panels almost always lack narrative. Single person, or well rehearsed dual-speaker presentations usually have key takeaways that make the talk memorable.<p>SXSW is particularly bad when it comes to panel discussions. Typically one organizer has a few half-baked talking points while the other participants haven't prepared whatsoever.