I don't remember who was who so I'm not voting on the individuals. I liked a lot of the other sponsored sessions better. There's nothing wrong with a sales pitch. It's just that this one was disguised. They didn't get around to saying what their product did (everything in the demo) until the end so one didn't know how to do anything suggested. This lack of continuity was hard for me to follow.

They are not supposed to be sales pitches.
I HATE when presenters turn the presentation into a sales pitch, so I tried really hard to stay high level and not talk about our product. But then attendees wanted detail and asked "What tools do YOU use to implement these best pratices?" D'oh. Now what?

We did not plan to do a demo at the end, had I planned on doing a demo at the end, I would have sprinkled product screenshots throughout the presentation. In retrospect, the outcome seem pretty predictable.

Jeanne, I was the tall blonde guy, you can be critical of my presentation if you want, if you don't, how will I learn? :D

This was the worse sponsor session I attended. While the speaker thought he was just too cute. There was absolutely not content nor any information. Based on the description I expected to hear something about how to filter. Instead it was one man's story of how he hands information. And he does not do it very well. They should have attended Shirky's talk and pick up some books. Complete waste of time.

Not TOO cute, in fact, just cute enough. When I had long hair THAT was too cute, so I cut it.

"I expected to hear something about how to filter"
Sorry that I didn't meet your expectations (really), but I dont believe that outboard filters are good enough, and I dont think that I can teach you how to organize your content and use your internal filter in 40 minutes.

I watch my 18 and 20 year old kids, and they don't use outboard filters; they just FLY through the data and let their brains do the filtering. Give it a try, it really works. Don't worry about every little bit of information, all the good stuff comes back around anyway. I really do think that filtering is best done in the brain. (Of course that requires tools that allow for proper organization.)

As for Clay (Shirky's) presentation, I did miss it, which was really too bad. But I do note that even HE has some negative comments. :) But I agree with what I have heard about his presentation, it *is* about filter failure. Using outboard filters (Eluma, Friendfeed, Google Reader, etc) is good for a first pass, and hopefully the next round of tools will be even better. But ultimately users need good organization tools and to learn how to filter content with their inboard filters.