will conferences lose their appeal in valley

Today was the start of yet another conference around facebook applications called Graphing Social Patterns. A must go conference, so everyone says. Many of my friends are going to be visiting, many hope they could have. Dave is a blogger I respect, though I dont agree with him sometimes.

Another must go conference called CommunityNext around the same subject was wrapping up organized by kind of friend (we met) Noah Kagan.

The common theme around both of these conferences remain the same. Speakers from media, VC and top facebook applications gather and preach the best way to develop apps, the value of social graph, how this is the next best thing invented since sliced bread and arguing about the yet but slowly emerging business models around facebook and social networking economy.

All is good but do you really need to be in the conference to get to hear what is going to be said in these times. There are so many bloggers that I am anyways inundated with the feeds, I am almost always behind trying to play catchup all the time. Ditto for business networking. Given the plethora of meetups in the valley around your favorite subjects you dont really need to be in these conferences unless you are either trying to expand your team or meet VC's. I would comment later on futility of meeting a VC during such conferences, but thats for later.

And then I find it funny for small startups having to pay hundred of dollars. Hosting and attending a conference is not inexpensive.

So the question is, will conferences lose their appeal in the years ahead?