Virtually Attend the 2008 IA (Information Architechture) Summit

Those of us who focus on the user experience try to stay up to date with the latest trends in information architecture, but many of us weren’t able to hop down to Miami in April to attend the 2008 IA Summit. Fear not, fellow IAers. Maybe it’s too late to get that Miami tan, but you can still catch up on the conference from your home computer and chime in at the next IA cocktail party.

The IA Summit’s website does an excellent job laying out the different sessions. You can search:

• By conference schedule
• Alphabetically

While many post-conference sites agree to share the slides with non-attendees, the IA Summit is kind enough to share videos of several of the slideshows accompanied by audio from the actual event.

Here’s an image of slide from James Robertson’s presentation What do innovative intranets look like? The player on the conference website allows you to paginate to a particular slide and jump to that section of the audio as well. Some presentations are even available for download.

The conference boasts a wide range of topics such as:

• Creating career paths for UX professionals
• How to be a user experience team of one
• Inspiration from the edge: New patterns for interface design

Another great resource is Boxes and Arrows, which recently posted a nice summary of Day 1 at the conference with embedded audio for each one. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before summaries of the subsequent days are there as well.

Related posts:

1. Small Business Summit – February 11, 2008
2. Information Overload: Are You Up for the Interface Challenge?
3. Microsoft Small Business Summit – Free online event
4. The Web’s Future: Peering into the Crystal Ball
5. Bloggers Give Us Front Row Seats at MacWorld 2008