Interesting new way to watch a NECC keynote: from a comfortable chair in the bloggers cafe instead of a stiff one in the middle of a huge room with five or six thousand others.

We almost didn’t make it, however, since the sound was screwed up until a couple of seconds after the presenter began.

You’d think with all those techies in that space, one of us could have figured out that the speaker was broken. Someone in the crowd probably also had a replacement in their bag. :-)

Speaking of crowds, the speaker was James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds which was published about four years ago.

It was a good talk, although the information was very familiar to anyone who read the book. And, like most keynotes, it ran about 15 minutes too long. Or maybe that’s just my short attention span talking.

I’ve long since given up on trying to live blog talks like these so don’t look for any details on the talk here. Check out Hitchhikr where you’ll find plenty of good summaries.

However, I do wish I had brought my laptop. Around me I could hear the tap-tap-tap from some of the back channel conversation going on and it would have been fun to follow it. Take a look at Vicki’s Cover It Live archive for one great example.

Also the stream of the presentation will probably be up on the NECC site shortly after the conference is done.