I won’t say much about this here since it’s covered in detail elsewhere, but for those of you who haven’t heard,  a lot of new startups are demo-ing today at Techcrunch 50.  The social media stream has really come together on this one, with a ton of great coverage online. Check out the livestream here and scoot on over to here to see Tweets about the conference.

You can also head over to Seesmic to find a ton of video reports right from the floor.  Seesmics’ involvement in this has been really great. With all the options out there to get info, it’s almost worth asking yourself at what point does the coverage online become so rich and so varied that you would risk losing out on information by actually being there on the floor? It’s a bit analogous to watching auto racing on TV versus in person -sure, you are going to get that visceral smoke-in-your-eyes-seat-shaking good time if you pony up for 200 dollar tickets and sit in the stands, but you’ll also see about 25% of the race from that vantage point compared to the television coverage.

One wonders at what point following an event like this online instead of in-person is not only an acceptable alternative, but an actual advantage when it comes to being able to synthesize the most data efficiently.  I’ll attempt to explore this conundrum more in depth in a later post.