To learn about new, often relevant developments, I would do searches for stuff you're tracking on Citeseer. There is also a research paper search engine called Citeulike, which is sort of a social tracking engine for research papers.

You can generally absorb whatever is presented in academic conferences in a fraction of the time by regularly scanning research papers. It has the side bonus of keeping you periphially aware of folks doing interesting research in your field (who you often end up running into, sooner or later).

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ http://www.citeulike.org/