But that was not to be! Thanks to the incredible generosity of the conference organizers, I've been invited to attend the upcoming Supernova next week in San Francisco. I'm particularly excited about this one because it combines two of my passions - technology and business - in a forum packed with industry leaders and mover/shakers (similar to cocktail shakers in that their presence at these events is often combined with a fair amount of alcohol and that merely standing near them can sometimes make you tipsy with excitement). A particular thanks to Deb Schultz for the gracious invitation, and for some advice on an upcoming Radiant Core project which I can't talk about just yet.

The schedule looks particularly tasty: they're running an OpenSpaces event on Tuesday at Wharton West, and those who know me know that I'm drawn to those events like a moth to a self-organized, community-driven, meritocracy-based flame. Be still my beating heart and pray that AA gets me to SF in time to catch part of it!

Wednesday is Challenge Day, a series of workshop like events "designed to provoke opinions from leading technology and business thought-leaders on key Supernova topics". I'm particularly looking forward to Making Computers Smart: A Dumb Idea? (Moderator: John Markoff, Barney Pell, Elizabeth Charnock, Nova Spivack), Introducing the Relationship Economy (Jerry Michalski, David Weinberger, Doc Searls), Research and Relationships (Discussion Lead Max Kalehoff, Aaron Coldiron, Steven Haskel, Jonathan Carson), and Where's the Innovation? (Lightning Talks).

Thursday and Friday move into more traditional session days, with everybody moving through a series of talks and presentations together. Topics range from Dark Matter: Are We Missing the Real Internet Economy? to The Social Web: Choices and Voices to Disorder: Feature or Bug?. It all looks pretty interesting, and I plan to blog as much of it as I can, bandwidth allowing (in both the time and network senses).

Registration is still open and I highly recommend it if you're involved in the web. It's not a particularly cheap conference (the Challenge Day is a great deal at $695, the full three days will run you $2,595), but the caliber of the participants is high and the sessions are quite small so you're virtually guaranteed to make some good contacts. If you're going and want to meet, drop a comment on this post or find me on Twitter.