In this recent post to his blog Zeev Suraski (of Zend) recounts his experience in attending a conference (one in Istanbul, Turkey) without actually being there.

Last Saturday, the first PHP-centric web conference has taken place in Istanbul, Turkey. A couple of months ago a guy name Sidar Sahin touched base with me, inviting me to give the opening keynote in that conference.

Becuse of the troubles in Gaza and that part of the world, Zeev wasn't able to attend - but he still did, in a sense:

Eventually, I decided to simply videotape the keynote (a shortened version of it), and send it over. Doing it was slightly more challenging than I expected - given that I wanted to show both myself and the background slides in the same video; But I think I managed to create an OK compromise, where both myself and the slides behind me were reasonably bright and in focus.

You can get the basic idea of how it looked from this shot taken at the conference. This isn't the first time that a video keynote has been delivered in the PHP community - at a previous year's php|architect conference, Marco Tabini gave a live video keynote.