A cool suggestion was made in comments to Dave's rant against IDG's Syndicate conference organizers' unreasonable demands: conference-jacking!

The way I interpret it, the idea is to use conferences as a tag of sort to hang podcasts off of, effectively creating alternative conference tracks anyone can contribute or listen to for free from anywhere anytime.

I've felt that most of the available podcasts were too radio show like, meaning they are pumped out everyday on whatever topic each podcaster is interested in. So topics are scattered and so are the podcasts.

Conference-jacking brings the podcasters together to a single location (a wiki + an OPML feed would work) to talk about a small focused set of topics that coincides with a meatspace event that someone else organized and spent money to publicize.

Radical!

Update:

I've registered alterence.* domain. Looks like Tyler Karaszewski couldn't resist either. He registered openconferences.org.