One of our group goals as the Community Development team here at ESPN.com is to be a productive member of the global community of developers.

Each member of the team is a habitual social networking user with a deep love for the latest and greatest technology used to build and innovate the best web sites on the internet.

We're doing a number of things in our effort to contribute back to the community, including starting this blog, and one of the other main aspects of our effort is attending technology conferences. There are a slew of conferences happening all the time and though we can't make it to as many as we'd like, we did manage to make it out to our first a short couple of weeks ago. We were fortunate to have a fun and interesting one take place in nearby Hollywood at the Community Next event Next Generation: Media and the Web.

The one day event took place a couple of weeks ago now but we thought it would be a good idea to still give a little round up of our experience there.

The event featured some of the most well known sites on the social landscape and some that even we've never heard of so there was a good cross section of speakers and sponsors.

Here's a list of some of the sites that were represented: MySpace, Gaia, Songza, Geni, Warner Bros Records, Pandora (blog), The Hype Machine, YouTube, Scoble, Mashable, Reddit, 8020 Publishing, Veronica Belmont, Meebo, Playboy U.

None of us here have been regular conference goers so we didn't know really what to expect from the event. We were stoked to find out it was a very casual affair with a lot of cool people in attendance. The food was good and the schwag the sponsors were giving away was pretty good to boot!

We, all three of us, took in the event in shifts though there was a good couple of hours or so when we were all there together. I took the early shift since I love breakfast the most and got to listen to some interesting talks and presentations before I had to take off for a previously planned engagement. I'm a huge music lover so I got the most out of Aza Raskin's presentation about his songerize site. I never knew about the site prior but have since checked it out and now count it in my repertoire of music consumption. Two other peeps that were part of the Music/Radio discussion represented their sites which I had heard of before included Pandora and The Hype Machine. Though I hadn't checked either out in a while, it was cool to hear what they were up to and get their thoughts on what's happening in the ever changing world of music and how the dynamics of the internet are changing the way we as music lovers get and listen to music.

There's some great video that was taken at the event up on Stickam and there are a slew of photos uploaded on Flickr that are tagged with communitynext.

We're looking forward to attending many more conferences as we grow as a group and get the word out about what we're working on here at ESPN.