This past year I've been getting quite a few speaking engagements at conferences, some big and some small, and now also one abroad! I'm just returning home from overseas where I have given a talk at the Defrag social technology conference in Denver, Colorado.

The stated goal of the conference is "accelerating the “aha” moment". It aims to be doing this by gathering a wide range of thought leaders and leading innovators from the technology sector and bringing them together in a topical forum to see where we go from here. This of course means that networking at this conference is incredible with the crowd being made up of very savvy, smart and interesting people. In addition there were a few but very good open spaces, excellent keynotes, panel discussions and a series of topical explorations beginning with a set of talks and rounding off with open debates.

My talk was in the topical exploration on "Leveraging the Open Web". It started out by an introduction to the industrialization of content creation Peter Sweeney, after which I covered the basics of Open Data from where I handed over to Paul Miller to talk about Linked Data, and finally the session was rounded off with a short debate facilitated by Ben Kepes.

In many ways this was one of the most interesting conference experiences I've had, so I've also blogged about it in more detail here.