Conference attendance seems to be really down this year:

• The first fall TechMentor Conference saw low attendance even with its relocation to Brooklyn, which one would consider a locus of of all sorts of IT needs.
• IT Pro Connections, the new conference designed to bring technologists and managers together found itself later merging with the Connections conference held in November in Las Vegas.
• The Virtualization Congress in London announced last weekend its cancellation, likely due to low attendance.

There are a lot of potential explanations for this level of turnout with the conferences of today. When the economy is hurting, easily the first budget line-item to go is training. But there's more there too. Are these conferences doing a good job of advertising themselves? Are IT people still reading the traditional print magazines and other outlets where these are often advertised? Is 2008 not a great year for new content? Are there simply too many conferences and not enough IT professionals to go around any more?

All of these are questions sure to be asked by conference managers everywhere. The economy and its problems are a good fall guy for the problems of this year, problems that aren't likely to be resolved even into 2009. But the other questions still resonate with me, with special consideration to this one: Is the IT Conference a dying entity?

I've been teaching at IT conferences for many years now and attending them for as long as I can remember. I personally see them as one of the best ways for already educated IT professionals to get a very quick leg-up on new technologies and practices that are time consuming to gleam from textbooks and hard to learn while on the job. I see them as a much better use of time than traditional classroom training, since you have the opportunity to go as wide across topics or as deep into a specific topic as you want.

Conferences also have a leg up over classroom training in that if your instructor isn't top notch, then its easy to just find a new one in a new track. With classroom training if the difference between you and your instructor is about 24 hours of study, you're stuck.

So what's the answer? Are "virtual IT conferences" the wave of the future, where IT pros can learn conference material without the "nasty" travel to those "awful" resort locations with pools, amusement parks, and sometimes casinos? Or is the IT professional getting their content from other sources? I asked this same question not long ago over at MCPmag.com where I got a number of very illuminating answers.

What about you? Are you still getting what you need out of IT conferences? Are you still going? No matter if you answer yes or no to this question, why? What drives you towards or away from these tools for offsite learning (and a little fun too!)?