Gnomedex Wrap-Up

photo by Scott Beale

Gnomedex 5.0 is over. What a great conference. I met a bunch of really interesting people are involved with some really cool stuff. Many thanks to Chris Pirillo and Ponzi for organizing such an amazing event. I’ll definitely be back next year.

Here are my (non-Flickr) Gnomedex 5.0 photo galleries:

Registration Party

Day 1

Networking Bash

Day 2

These are a few highlights from my Gnomedex 5.0 experience:

– I met a bunch of the guys from Bryght (they host community content websites based on Drupal) who where down from Vancouver. Really great folks. They convinced Lee to have a BBQ before the event started which was an excellent way to kick off the weekend.

– In his keynote speech, Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team, announced that Longhorn will be supporting RSS, including IE. All the Microsoft people there were wearing t-shirts that said “Longhorn [heart symbol] RSS”. They are also developing some RSS enhancements called Simple List Extensions, which they will be releasing under the Creative Commons license and they even showed a video of Lawrence Lessig showing his support for this project. It’s great to see Microsoft get behind an open standard like RSS and include it in the next version of their browser (most other browsers already have this feature).

– Podcasting had a major presence at the conference, with both Dave Winer and Adam Curry giving keynotes. Adam recorded his keynote as his Daily Source Code episode #200 and ever popular The Gillmor Gang recorded a podcast from stage as well. Eric Rice and may others were podcasting all over the place and some, like Eric, Bre Pettis, and Steve Garfield were also video blogging (vlogging) the event. There was even Podbot, the podcasting robot.

– We all agreed that we need to find a simple solution to RSS synching as well as figure out the best way to deal with advertising through RSS feeds.

– Phillip Torrone, associate editor of Make Magazine, showed off a bunch of hack projects, including, the Portable Rotary Phone, an old rotary phone that you can insert your SIM card into and turn it into a cell phone.

– I met Abe Fettig and Scott McMullan from JotSpot who were working on a really cool live editing feature of their wiki script. I helped them with some Safari QA work when they first launched it at the conference.

– The Friday night Networking Bash was a really good time and it took place in the ultra-modern Seattle Public Library which looked like something out of Logan’s Run. The entire 4th floor is red, except for the bathrooms.

– Later Saturday night, Robert Scoble, the infamous “Microsoft Geek Blogger” organized a meetup at the Zig Zag Cafe as well as a breakfast the following morning. It was great hanging out with someone who works for Microsoft and is not afraid to speak his mind about that company’s actions and policies, especially when he disagrees with them. Robert was also the one who provided the bright red couch that was on stage during the conference and he and Chris Pirillo spent some “quality time” on it throughout the event.