I really like the idea of Confabb.com – a nice spot to go find out about various conferences that you might want to attend, with reviews and other great stuff built in.

As a first impression, however, I think that they have a ways to go before they are relevant. A search for identity management doesn’t exactly return comprehensive results. A search for “Catalyst” does bring up the Burton Group Catalyst conference — but they seem to think that the conference is about: “Computers and Internet , Computers and Internet, Computers and Internet , Computers , Networking , Firewalls/Security.” Out of their advertised 16,000+ conferences, who wants to guess how many of them are similarly tagged?

But the one that really makes me crack up is this:

Here is Eric’s review of Digital ID World – you can see the conference has a number: 4810. This would say to me that it is registered somewhere. You can also see the review, and the details of the conference:

However even though you can get to it if you go through the review, you can’t search for it by name:

So – Confabb has a little work to do. Or should I say, conference organizers have a little work to do. Confabb has supplied little more than a placeholder — the question is, will organizers care enough to fill the database with relevant data? Here’s hoping they do, and that after they do, the vendor improves their search algorithm enough for the rest of us to actually leverage the information.

Good luck Confabb, I hope people work hard to make you a success :)