For those of you in the Seattle area, I’d highly recommend attending Ignite Seattle next time they do it. The format is:

• Every presenter gets to show 20 slides
• Slides show for 15 seconds each and flip automatically – presenter doesn’t control them
• Topics were some startups, some hobbies, some non-profits, social groups, etc.

The fact that the presentations were kept short meant that people had to get through their ideas quickly, which kept the pace up and made it that much more entertaining. Jonah’s talk went well about the Darfur Wall – people seemed to love it. Eric Benson gave a cool talk on how to get what you want involves balancing your level of desire against the difficulty in getting something, and the different ways people circumvent that balance. Jordan Schwartz’ talk about SMS touched on a little bit of one of the ideas we had for wishlisting.com and Dan Shapiro (founder of Ontela) gave a great inspirational talk on what it takes to start a company. The vast majority of the talks were quite good and interesting. If they have it again, I will definitely be there.