Tag Archives: Gnomedex

Gnomedex: Day One

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Gnomedex has to be one of the best covered events in that everyone in the audience is blogging, twittering, videoing and flickr’ing.

Photo: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid” laughingsquid.com

300+ intense, passionate, creative people who all happen to be interested in media, communication and –to some greater or lesser degree– changing the world. Every one a blogger and many podcasters to boot.

Many have been blogging long enough –and hard enough– to have become bored or exhausted (or both) by its demands.

Web 2.0 is familiar and comfortable to these people. Passe for some. But these are the early adopters, the adept. The advance guard of the blogosphere.

Gnomedex 2007

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This year’s Gnomedex is billed as "The Blogosphere’s Conference." Speakers include: Guy Kawasaki, Cali Lewis, one of the JibJab guys, Justin Kan (Justin.tv), Jason Calcanis, and others. If you don’t recognize these names, it’s unlikely you’d enjoy the conference. But I look forward to it all year. This is my Indy 500/Super Bowl/World Series, minus the crowds (It’s a small conference, limited to about 300 attendees.)

For the first four or five years of the conference, I took vacation and paid my own expenses. But the Enlightened Management of Learfield now sees the value of this conference, so it’s work related and reimbursed.

Oooh, look! Goosebumps!

Six degrees of Robert Scoble

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I think I knew that Robert Scoble once worked with/for Dave Winer at Userland Software, but completely forgot writing this “thank you” to Chris Pirillo, waaaay back in 2002:

“We’re always quick to talk about poor service or support, so I’d like to be equally quick to report a wonderful experience. Based on your recommendation, I purchased a copy of Radio from Userland Software. Total impulse buy. I’d been playing with Blogger and when I saw that you liked Radio, I bought it.

Fact is, I really didn’t need the program and had a little problem getting going and wound up emailing the company for some help. Which I quickly got. In my first email to the company I mentioned that mine was a poorly thought out impulse buy and it would be great if I could “back up” on the purchase, never expecting the company to go along.

Today I got a very nice email from Robert Scoble, refunding my purchase. I immediately sent along my thanks and –in his reply– got an invite to Gnomedex 02! Just a nice way to end the day. You can’t go wrong dealing with the Lockergnome community.”

Small world.

“Edwards turns to non-tradtional campaign model”

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So reads the headline at WashingtonPost.com. I mention it here because Edwards was one of the keynote speakers (video) last July at Gnomedex, a tech conference held the last couple of years in Seattle. Politicians don’t usually court such a geeky audience. Looks like he might be the first major candidate (since Howard Dean?) to take a serious stab at harnessing some of the new media elements for his campaign.

When it came up in his Gnomedex appearance that he didn’t actually write his blog, the crowd jumped on him. Be interesting to see what he does with his official website.

Update: Just popped over for a look at his blog where the latest news was their ranking (#4) on YouTube. I sampled a few minutes of video from last night’s town hall meeting in Des Moines and realized that he (and other candidates) no longer have to rely on MSM to show a few seconds of an appearance in a newscast. They just post everything. At least, everything positive.

Of course, someone will ask, “But who’s watching YouTube?” And the answer is not “everybody,” but “anybody.”

Do you think there is any chance in hell that Edwards will pull a bone-head stunt like “macaca?”

If not apparant, I should emphasize that my interest here is media, not politics. I’m eager to see what role bloggers and podcasters and YouTube and other forms of social media play in the 2008 (and all future) election.

Five minutes ahead, five years behind

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Every year I come back from Gnomedex with a sense of perspective. A better understanding of where I am on the technology continuum (for lack of a better term).

Future: That space way out on the edge of what we already know about and what the smart kids at Google and Amazon and eBay et al. are dreaming up.

Present: This is what I think of as “state of the art.” People and companies in this Present have a good grasp of all the current technologies and tools and are using them every day. Everybody fully in the Present has a clue and is standing on tiptoe, peering into the mists of the Future.

Past: Where we’ve been. Valuable only in terms of how it helps us understand our place in the Present and the Future.

There were some very bright people at this year’s Gnomedex (and a few of us got in because we had $500) and as I listened to the discussions, I began seeing the image above in my head.

Learfield –the company I work for– is very successful. We are primarily a marketing and sales company with strong ties to what is frequently referrred to these days as “old media” (Radio and TV). Like all companies, we use the Internet extensively and we’re searching for ways to use it more effectively. But we’re not in the Present I described above. How far back up the road are we? I’m not sure. Perhaps we’re like those NASCAR drivers that get in behind the leaders and draft along until we see an opening.

And I’m only about five minutes ahead because this is all I think and read about. And even that small gap is narrowing.

Attending Gnomedex is like cresting a hill and –for just a few minutes– I can see some of the smart kids way off on the horizon, running toward the future. I won’t catch them, but it’s nice to get a glimpse every now and then.