Eventful Demand

Brian Dear is at Gnomedex, so I learn about his newly launched Eventful Demand, where the first event has been scheduled in the Boston area, my old hood.

Wil Wheaton, who being demanded in 134 cities by 2580 people, has been actively blogging about all the demand activity. He's also reached "critical mass" in several other cities, namely San Francisco, Montreal, and Atlanta. Read more about the launch and their upcoming plans for other cities.

Tag: Gnomedex
Tag: Gnomedex 2006
Tag: Eventful Demand

Attention Operating System

Steve Gillmor enters Gnomedex stage left. He announces that Root.net and Gesture Bank are teaming up to announce the Attention Operating System. “We’re building on the four attention principals: it translates to: we own our data, we’re the people who create it. If you’re in it, you can contribute."

Canter asks Gillmor about money and his response is centered around affinity groups. “The driver of attention economy is affinity groups. The blogosphere is an affinity group. Within this group, there are specific interests, i.e., windsurfing, politics, etc. There’s an opportunity within those groups to do cross-selling in a way that Amazon is currently doing.”

Gillmor continues, “If I have to choose between two clouds, one that is open and efficient or a closed club that isn't, I want to go to the open club rather than the Microsoft hairball."

He then talks about the value of an alternative like Gmail, where he can pull his information out of a cloud, and not be tethered to Office. "I’m not getting this for free. Not really. People often think that the attention trust is about to coax the majors in.

Frankly, the longer they push back on this, its of huge marketing value to us. Their attitude is to lock people in. People don’t want to be locked in – they want to be free, to choose and to own their data. Our goal is to create a gesture economy with a small number of people. We don’t have to convince the big crowds to play along. We’re beyond that.”

Someone from the audience asks, “you don’t believe in linking, right?” Says Gillmor, “are you referring to my anti-linking crusade? Yes, links are dead. And, Office and Notes are dead. Links are being gamed. The page view model is being replaced. It’s going to be about the relationship between the user and the cloud. And affinity groups.

We have a lot of clout in this environment -- the blogosphere, where its based on ameritocracy, not the old concept of what the mainstream media is about. The information is looking for us now rather than us looking for information. The user controls the dialogue, not big companies.”

The audience claps. Chris Pirillo reaffirms: “The users are in charge. We always have been.”

Tag: Gnomedex
Tag: Gnomedex 2006
Tag: Steve Gillmor

Sex on the Stage & Online

In the same afternoon, Susan Mernit talks to us about sex and Steve Gillmor on attention. Different? The same? Combined? HA.

She writes on her blog about her talk (below), including quotes from personal bloggers related to this topic:

Figleaf: "As you know, one of my on-going themes is that the average sex blogger doesn't do anything the average non-sex/non-blogger does except admit it. One of the huge benefits of sex blogging, especially anonymous sex blogging, is that we learn from each other that we're not the only ones."

Magadalena: "I have absolutely no idea how many sexual blogs there are or what percentage of the 40.1 million sites Technorati currently tracks dedicate themselves to sexual content, but I would think it's pretty high."

Bliatz: "I wish I had the courage to turn this blog into my main outlet. I wish I had the guts to just write everything here, expose the whole picture and expose it all to everybody. I wish I didn't feel I had to hide something as natural and straight-forward as my sexuality and all the thoughts and emotions connected to that."

Evil Minx, commenting on Anastasia's Sexualitie blog (which was hacked): "It's the loss of freedom that gets me also. The sheer uninhibited joy of being able to write as the person behind my eyes is what has kept me going over the last year. "

Tag: Gnomedex
Tag: Gnomedex 2006
Tag: Susan Mernit

Welcome Speech

On opening night of Gnomedex, Chris and Ponzi say thanks. Click play and turn up the volume.

Tag: Gnomedex
Tag: Gnomedex 2006

Stuffed Bears

One of the things I love about Seattle. There's a large stuffed bear on the floor in front of the fireplace in my hotel and an adorable teddy bear with a red Edgewater sweater propped up on several large pillows. How can you not feel warm and welcome when a stuffed bear greets you?

Pirillo and Ponzi

Chris Pirillo and Ponzi open Gnomedex 2006 at the opening reception in Seattle's Odyssey Maritime Discovery Center.

Tag: Gnomedex
Tag: Gnomedex 2006
Tag: Chris Pirillo

Gnomedex in Seattle Underway

Gnomedex Day 1 is underway on Seattle's waterfront: what a fabulous place to have an event!! I'm here wearing several hats, including 'learning new stuff,' which isn't something I always come home feeling. I'll be posting updates, notes and visuals over the next couple of days from the ground.

Check out a partial list of attendees, most of which link to their blog or a page that captures the essence of who they are. Same thing, no? RSS feed of the list here and OPML version here.

A sweet moment for me was bumping into Chris Pirillo's parents who wore the title: Staff on their badge. We mostly talked about Iowa, which brought back a wonderful memory of an ex-boyfriend's grandfather's 101th birthday many years ago.

Joe Pirillo has a great smile and note the strong family resemblance:

Tag: Gnomedex
Tag: Gnomedex 2006

Like Father, Like Daughter

Like father like daughter. Like daughter, like father.

Tag: Marc Canter

BloggerCon Recap

Here's a comprehensive overview of links, people, faces, descriptions that give me the right visuals at the right times from Dave that recaps last week's BloggerCon, the first one I've missed since he launched it at Harvard several years ago.

The playing field has dramatically changed since then and women are not only attending this 'tech' unconference but others as well and the trend continues. We want to be part of the conversation -- on the technical and business side.

While I was dancing on fire with Tony Robbins, Doc Searls and other 'super-bloggers' took notes, and lots of them. There was also a lot more podcast and vlog coverage this year.

Too bad that I missed this magic moment of Canter snoring. Classic. Speaking of, they just went live with People Aggregator, which is all about open social networking. You can create or join a network, build a community (where you define what the content, rules and policies are), and then connect to the community with those same rules and policies that make sense for you.

Tag: BloggerCon
Tag: BloggerCon 2006

Inside Out & to the World

Imagine having the inside of your living room on ValleyWag? They managed to capture a view from inside Robert Scoble's house, now for sale, in a recent blog post. For those who really want fame through their blog, be careful what you wish for.