Did you make it to IzeaFest last week? It was a fun experience, and a major source of motivation to do better as a blogger. As a general conference attendee, I was even surprised by how well everything turned out. Talks ran smoothly, things went well, they were broadcast live through Ustream, flickr and twitter feeds were buzzing throughout the event (and some up on monitors throughout the event) — just well done all around. The development team at Izea was working hard for quite a few product releases during IzeaFest as well, including some great new addons to SocialSpark and the public alpha of CloudShout (available on the Izea Blog if you want to check it out). I just started helping out on CloudShout about 2 weeks back, but I’m floored by the possibilities of it; and it’s been fun for someone as interested in Javascript as me.

One very nice thing about IzeaFest is that all the talks are available online! One of the talks I was most looking forward to didn’t let me down either — Merlin Mann from 43 Folders keynote on How to Blog. Deceptive title for a great talk. I dare anyone to listen to it and not want to start a blog right then and there. He has some other great talks out there like Inbox Zero and Getting Things Done.

Aside from that, Izea has a way of throwing some great night events. Thursday night they took over the lounge at the Grand Bohemian for an elegant night of great food and drinks. Friday and Saturday nights also had food and drink events down on Wall Street with tons of bloggers and advertisers in attendance. I still have yet to find out the details on the IzeaHunt (a photo scavenger hunt through downtown) from yesterday night, but I’m imagining it was crazy.

If you’re in Orlando this week there’s a lot of cool stuff going on. Monday is our monthly Adogo meeting with a very interesting talk on Ajax by Brian LeGros. He’ll be going over some Ajax basics and move onto some “push” Ajax, a topic that’s extremely useful but rarely covered. A majority of ajax sites use polling to know when to retrieve data from the server, but with a push service, such as BlazeDS, you can cut out the polling altogether. It’s something I’ve been wanting to learn about for a while, so I’m looking forward to his talk. If you’re curious about the code, it’s available in the Adogo SVN repo, and a recording of the presentation will be available online shortly after.

Thursday is the monthly Orlando Ruby Users Group meeting, which this month will be taking a break from Ruby in favor of Seaside, a Smalltalk framework. There’s a famous quote (by DHH I believe) referencing Seaside: “I defy anyone to come up here and use any other framework to duplicate what we’re doing in Rails as quickly. Except Avi.” — Avi being the creator of Seaside. Although I haven’t messed with Seaside this looks like it’ll be an interesting talk. Don’t know if I’ll make it though, due to the BIG EVENT for the week.

Thursday night through Saturday night is IzeaFest, which is looking better and better. Aside from a fast growing list of attendees, there’s some exciting speakers including Merlin Mann from 43 Folders, Jeremy Shoemaker from ShoeMoney, John Chow a lots more. The scavenger hunt on Saturday night should make for some fun stories after the fact as well.