BloggerCon Starts

I got up early to attend the third BloggerCon conference this weekend at Stanford Law School, the first BloggerCon on the West Coast. Driven once again by blogger guru David Winer, I walked in to the pre-session to find well over a hundred bloggers, developers, users and vendors singing This Land is Your Land.

Doc Searls sits next to Phil Wolff, Stowe Boyd and Jerry Michalski in the front row and Dan Gillmor sits behind them with the U.S. map open on his Mac showing the familiar sad photo of all those red states.

J.D. Lasica is positioned front center and is in charge of the video camera. Robert Scoble stays in his prime position in front row center until his session on Information Overload later in the day. Buzz and Mary Hodder sit next to me. Steve Gillmor behind me. Great photos thanks to Doc.

They're my industry buds, the people I respect. I read their blogs, am richer because of their viewpoints and they vary from technology to politics to music.

The scene changes as blogs become more mainstream and the third time around, we’re seeing more women and bloggers who have never been a developer. Adam Curry is still the most right brain creative “looking” of the bunch. And probably the funkiest dresser among us. Ya gotta love those pink shades.

It reminded me of Mr. American Airline Pilot’s comment about how bloggers dressed. Serves me right for bringing a "date" to the pre-session blogger dinner Friday night.

Frankly, I don’t think he meant it as a slight so much as his first observation of how casual the world of developers, technologists and bloggers really is, at least relative to his world. He stood in the back hiding the cigar he wanted to light up and was humored by this foreign environment.

My first observation is that the third BloggerCon is a different animal than the first two:
1) More women albeit not by many
2) More numbers in general
3) We’re on the west coast
4) There’s a session on making money
5) It’s not just about making tools better