Hot on the heels of BarCamp, I attended Day 1 of Mesh.  (It was no co-incidence that the two were held so close together.  Mesh panelist/speakers Tara Hunt and Chris Messina helped to organize BarCampTdot).

Mesh was organized by a group of bloggers who felt that the type of discussion taking place in Silicon Valley should happen in Toronto.  So rather than look to others, they organized a conference themselves.  The group includes Mark Evans, Stuart McDonald, Matthew Ingram, Mike McDerment and Rob Hyndman.

I think that it is incredible that this group could organize a conference in 9 weeks.  They had a great group of speakers and panelists.  In some cases, I think that they asked their favourite bloggers and perhaps not the people most authoritative people to speak on 'Web 2.0'.  Who would I rather hear from?  Someone from Yahoo, Microsoft or Google.  Someone from a hardware vendor (RIM?).

The group of attendees at Mesh was a real cross section.  I saw many of the same people that I saw at BarCamp or previous DemoCamps.  Many active participants in Toronto's development community attended as did a number of venture capitalists.  Also, there were many communications and marketing specialists attending from traditional industries.

I think Mesh could have benefited from a Web 2.0 101 stream and an advanced Web 2.0 stream.  The huge attendance and questions asked at Tris Hussey's well done 'Blogging 101' presentation illustrated how new these concepts are to most people.

I enjoy the topics that are discussed at Mesh but I don't think that there is enough acknowledgement that these concepts are very advanced and not yet mainstream.  I know that traditional media is going to go through huge changes because of Web 2.0 but I still have friends who say 'What's blogging?'.