Gnomedex

Gnomedex 6 Registration is Open

Brad Wilson — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 20:10:00 GMT

Registration for Gnomedex is open, with its typical discount for returning attendees. I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it this year, though. If it’s anything like last year, it’ll be totally kick ass. The venue is excellent, and Seattle in early July offers perfect weather.

Gnomedex 5.0: Post-Mortem

Brad Wilson — Sun, 26 Jun 2005 13:18:00 GMT

Gnomedex is 24 hours past. I've been to 3, 4, and 5 now. Here's my random thoughts on the success of the event:

The facility was fantastic, on an entirely different scale from 3 and 4. This is the difference between hosting a conference in a conference center, and a conference in a hotel ballroom. There's no question that the room layout was for the best.
Many kudos to PubSub for sponsoring the power drops everywhere. You didn't see people in the hallways scrambling for an outlet between talks. Similar kudos to all the people who kicked ass to make the WiFi usable.
The caliber of presentations was overall much better than the previous two years (not to pick on anybody in particular). I'm still not entirely fond of the multi-person panels, because it seems like you end up with a lot of wandering as the panelists (and the audience) all try to get focus on their specific topic.
The general tone has changed dramatically from GD3 to GD5, for the better. I felt like GD3 was used as an excuse by a bunch of self-assigned "A list" bloggers to get together in cliques and get drunk, ripping on others. This was no fault of Chris'; it was just the growing pains of the conference. Whereas GD3 felt like an always nearly-out-of-control blogger party, GD5 felt like a professionally run and attended event. (GD4 felt like the transition between the two; the move to be more professional, hampered by decisions to entice the partiers to attend.)
Hurrah for Adam, Dave, and Steve for convincing Chris to re-focus his web site. ;)
You can't say enough good things about Ponzi. Besides being extremely good at making sure everything is running well, she is above all nice to everybody. Chris, to quote Best Week Ever, "Upgrade!". :-)

I'm already looking forward to GD6. Congrats, Chris!

Behold... the Power of Gnomedex

Brad Wilson — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 16:35:00 GMT

The top 4 of the 5 latest buzz articles on NewsGator right now are talking about the Longhorn RSS story that was announced at Gnomedex this weekend.

Update: Business Week: "The fact that Microsoft is putting so much effort behind RSS suggests that the technology's time has come."

Gnomedex 5.0: Day 2

Brad Wilson — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 10:53:00 GMT

Hobie Swan

Hobie Swan demonstrated the MindManager product. It's hard to describe in text how this product works: it's about capturing and organizing thoughts, and it's very effective with tablet PCs. The ability to organize data, dynamically expand and collapse, and integrate outside data (including live RSS feeds and live web searches) is really excellent!

Julie Leung

This presentation was a story about Julie's growth in the blog space as person, as a parent. Summarizing it wouldn't do the presentation justice. This was a fantastic talk. Way to go Julie!

Adam Curry (closing keynote)

Adam is releasing today's closing keynote at Daily Source Code #200.

Adam's talking about the past, present and future of podcasting. Some key points:

We need one click subscription.
Metadata about enclosures is important.
We need to solve the bandwidth issue now before it's a major problem.
The differences between the tools the pros and amateurs are using is vanishingly small.

Gnomedex 5.0: Day 1

Brad Wilson — Fri, 24 Jun 2005 07:36:00 GMT

Pre-Conference

I arrived early: too early, maybe, but I wasn't exactly sure where I was going, wanted to make sure I was plenty early enough. All that junk. I haven't really adjusted to the fact that it really only takes me 20 minutes to get from the "sticks" (read: Redmond) into Seattle proper.

The facility is very nice. Wireless coverage is all over the place. As interesting things happen, I'll be blogging the conference talks. If you're looking for me today... tall, black pants, blue shirt, spiky brown hair, Acer tablet. Oh, there's also the matter of the badge... ;)

Dave Winer (keynote)

Dave Winer is inventor or co-inventor of technologies like RSS, OPML, XML-RPC, and SOAP.

Dave demonstrated his open source OPML editor tool, which combines OPML and RSS. It looks like a slick upgrade to the outlining editor that shipped with Radio. It's interesting to see the conversion of RSS from a transient transfer format into a more permanent storage mechanism for content with extensible metadata.

There's a lot of freeform discussion about the importance of OPML and RSS outside the sphere of geeks. IMO, Dave has an over-inflated sense of these things... even if my mom knows what a blog is, she doesn't know or care about the technologies surrounding it.

Surreal moment: the room is singing Yellow Submarine to close. :-p

Dean Hachamovitch (keystone)

Dean Hachamovitch is General Manager of Longhorn Browsing and RSS Technology at Microsoft.

Dean is talking about the evolution of information on the web:

Phase 1: Browse. Powerful but limited to what you know.
Phase 2: Search. Finding information that you didn't know about.
Phase 3: Subscribe. "It's not a feature: it's a new approach"

Subscribe changes the way you consume the web, like TiVo changes the way you consume television. "In Longhorn, we're betting big on RSS, for developers and for end-users."

Showing RSS in IE 7 on Longhorn (and showing IE 7 for the first time ever in public). When IE discovers a feed with RSS, it lights up the RSS button in the toolbar. Click, and see a preview. The preview contains an integrated search capability. To subscribe, click the Plus, which is modeled after favorites in IE. It looks like a polished and simplified version of the RSS capabilities in Firefox.

Go to MSN and perform a search. The search results have an RSS feed. "Why should I search again? Why shouldn't I just subscribe to the results to find out when new results show up?"

The user's subscription data is part of the user's data, exposed via APIs. "This isn't IE's data, this is the user's data. The browser is incidental: this is about the platform." The underlying platform will take care of subscriptions and synchronization, parsing the available formats (RSS/0.9x, RSS/1.0, RSS/2.0, Atom, etc.).

Shows a special version of RSS Bandit that synchronizes with the user subscription data. Shows an RSS feed with iCalendar items as enclosures, then a script that keeps Outlook synchronized with these automatically. Shows a screensaver that pulls a photo blog using photos as enclosures, showing the photos as captions during the screensaver.

Discusses simple extensions to RSS that describes lists, which have different semantics (markup, ordering, addition and removal, etc.). Can be used for things that are natural lists, like wish lists, which have different behavior from typical RSS (periodic publishing vs. dynamic lists). Extensions released under Creative Commons.

Specifications available today at blogs.msdn.com/ie. More coming at PDC 2005 w/ Longhorn beta 1. As much as possible will be available downlevel.

Gillmor Gang

In attendance: Steve Gillmor, Doug Kaye, Dave Winer, Adam Curry, Dan Gillmor, Dean Hachamovitch, Robert Scoble.

Opening comments talk about the history of syndication, RSS, podcasting, and the connections between the speakers.

Dave: "My message on Podcasting is that anybody can do it."

Adam: "Podcasting it the dream of any broadcaster's life. It doesn't have to be about audio." The blockers used to be distribution (who owns the frequencies?) and time. Now that's not an issue.

Adam: "What I said to Steve Jobs was: 'Please take our directory (OPML) and use it. And when you're done, push it back out as a directory.' "

Steve Gillmor, Dave Sifry, Scott Gatz

The conversation centered mostly around Steve's desire to rid the world of information silos. Some companies are about distributing your information to you, and others are about making you come to them for information. This seems like a replay of last year, where Steve was telling everybody who would listen about how important Attention.xml is.

Coming to Gnomedex?

Brad Wilson — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 14:31:00 GMT

If you're coming to Gnomedex this year and you'd like to get together, please contact me. I'm going, and I live in the area... I think it would be cool to get people together maybe for dinner Thursday night.

Oh, and Gnomedex just sold out! Congrats, Chris. :)

Gnomedex 5.0 Speaker List

Brad Wilson — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 18:02:00 GMT

The speaker list for Gnomedex 5.0 is starting to shape up nicely. The announcement of Adam Curry as the Keynote speaker shows where this conference is going.

Since I'll be living in the area, it seems unlikely that I won't be able to make it. There has been some talk about the increased price, but honestly... a 3 day conference for $99 was really only possible in Iowa. As the show has grown and the topics and speakers become better, it still seems to me like a good deal at $399.

Wil at Gnomedex

Brad Wilson — Sat, 02 Oct 2004 18:20:00 GMT

Wil Wheaton just got done speaking.

He was the highlight of the show. He's an excellent speaker, and the audience was absolutely rapt throughout the whole time. He signed books afterward... the second picture is him with Dave Nielsen of PayPal, holding each other's books. Wil's a fantastically nice person. :)

Pictures from Gnomedex

Brad Wilson — Fri, 01 Oct 2004 11:36:00 GMT

I brought my digital camera to Gnomedex, so I'm posting photos here. There's not much here yet, as the conference has just started. Check in periodically over the weekend.

iBook Prep

Brad Wilson — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 13:51:00 GMT

I've had this iBook (12" G4 800Mhz) for quite a while. It's a work machine that we use to test to see if our public site and web app are Safari-friendly.

I decided this year that I'd rather have the iBook with me at Gnomedex than the monster Compaq, mostly because: 1. it's smaller, 2. it's lighter, 3. it has about 3x the battery life, and 4. it's cooler. :)

The AirPort Extreme wireless card arrived today. The physical installation took longer than getting it online w/ my Windows network (and Linksys WRT54G wireless router). Within about a minute, it was surfing the web like a pro; another couple minutes with Tom's assistance, and I had mounted Windows shared file systems and my Samsung laser printer. Another 5 minutes, and I had my new AirPort Express running. Oh, and Tom hooked me on Adium for my multi-IM needs.

I have to say: the more time I spend with this Mac, the less time I want to spend with my PCs!