When I saw that the St Louis Interactive Festival was announced not long ago, I was excited to hear that finally, someone was organizing something to do with web and interactive media and it was actually in St. Louis as opposed to San Fran or Chicago or wherever!  Needless to say, as a professional web developer that longs for the action of San Francisco and a blogger of over five years, I was completely on board with this, but when I first saw it, it was still in its infancy and I was, as usual, busy with work, so I kind of lost track of it until today when I saw someone retweet something from the festival’s Twitter account. 

Thats how I got to the page with the I guess final line-up of panels at the festival (here).  Don’t get me wrong, I think most of these are solid panel ideas for some people, but honestly I was VERY disappointed with the lack of any video related panels and the fact that there weren’t at least some deep and more high-level discussions.  This isn’t to say I won’t go, and its not to say I wouldn’t love to get on the CSS panel (I consider myself a bit of a CSS ninja, especially for a developer and I am one of the few developers I know that feel that knowing CSS is a major key to being a good developer) but I was really hoping for some topics that covered:

• Social Network Creation: Should I? Why? How?
• The New Streaming Video Frontier: Qik? Ustream? Justin.tv? Kyte.tv? How Can You Use This New Medium?
• What to Make of the Sudden Crush of Semi-Social Entertaiment Sites Rising Up For St. Louis (something I know a little bit about)
• Creating Video for the Web (Hello!?!  Anyone out there heard of a dude named Bill Streeter that lives in this neck of the woods?!?  …I mean really?! Nothing about video?)