I feel that I need that technological “reboot” more than ever but the big question is should I make the investment? Thinking out loud, it is an investment in myself…

Now you got me thinking…  What to do…  Decisions, decisions…

I don’t really have much to say about this year’s festivities other than what has already been said all over the Internet. I hate to say it, but for me, the highlight of this year’s conference was getting to hang out my regular group of friends in Seattle (and not the actual conference itself). Was I completely disappointed? Absolutely not. There were a handful of speakers who were good (Guy Kawasaki and Ignite Seattle were my favorites) and I got to see more of Seattle than I was able to over the past several of years.

Maybe things need to be mixed up?

I think part of the general apathetic feeling that is going on around this year’s Gnomedex is that things need to be changed up a bit.

The event has been at the same location for the past three years (for as long as it has been hosted in Seattle). The kick-off party has always been at the Odyssey Maritime Center. Bell Harbor Conference Center is a great facility and the perfect size for the event, but for those of who attend every year (and I would guess that is the majority of attendees) maybe it needs to be somewhere else? We all end up sitting in the same seats as we do year after year (no one’s fault but our own, I know!). Even the pastries at the continental breakfast each morning are the same year after year (though, those almond-y ones are very good!). :)

I know it’s Chris‘ current hometown, but in my opinion, a change of venue and maybe even moving the event away from Seattle would really re-boot things. I was at the last Gnomedex in Iowa (back in 2003!) and loved the fact that the majority of the people in attendance had to make a conscious effort to get there. The room was full of people from all over which brought a lot of dynamics and energy that really worked well with the speaker line-up. Although I wasn’t there, I heard the same things about Gnomedex 4 that took place in Lake Tahoe.

So what about next year?

I think that I’m going to wait and see what the speaking line-up/plans for next year are. While a lot of what Gnomedex is about are the conversations (hallway, back-channel, at the parties, etc), the speakers who are on stage set the tone/theme. This year’s set of speakers did not set that tone. The hallway conversations weren’t the excited-what’s-next type of conversations. The clique’s retreated to themselves since there wasn’t much to talk about other than “how crazy” the keynote, etc were.

Now that I’m typing all of this out I’m realizing that maybe because so much is the same year after year, I’m/we are expecting the same type of conference year after year?

Anyways, I just wanted to write some of these thoughts down since I was thinking about them a lot. You may agree with me or you may not. I know Chris and Ponzi put a ton of effort and energy into the event each year and really respect their dedication. There was just something about the vibe this year that didn’t make it a stand out year for me.

I think the feelings I have about Gnomedex 2007 come from my attendance of several over the last couple of years and people who attended for their first time may have a completely different set of thoughts/feelings. Regardless, I’m still anxiously looking forward to what Mr. Pirillo has up his sleeve for 2008.

If you want to follow things (LIVE!), I highly suggest checking out http://live.pirillo.com (everything is being streamed live) or keep your eye’s on Robert Scoble’s Twitter w/Friends page… He is following over 5,000 people on Twitter (and I’m guessing the majority of these users are either here or watching live).

My picture is in a post on Steve Rubel’s Micro Persusasion site today (along with Matt and JR… oh, yeah, there’s Matt Mullenweg and the one of the “crazy uncles” in front of us ~ wait, aren’t “links dead”?) :)

The post is about Nielsen banning blogging at a conference of their’s this past week. Steve has a good point about conferences like Gnomedex that have started becoming very popular due to their exposure from everyone blogging.

Hell, that’s one of the best parts about going to events like Gnomedex: being able to join in the conversation (well, that and the possibility that a crowd shot that includes you nerding out in the second row shows up on a farily popular website)… :)

I’m having some problems embedding this, so here’s a link to the video on YouTube.

Update:
As you probably can tell, YouTube kind of jacked up the synchronization of the audio/video… If you can’t go without seeing the “real video“, fear not! Here it is (~ 22mb) -> marusindrumming.AVI

I’ve had tech/geek overload for the last couple of days and here I am at home sitting on a computer!  I spent the whole flight back to Chicago writing down notes and thinking through some of the ideas that have sparked inside of my head over the last 4 days.  I had a great time as always and you better believe I’ll be back at Gnomedex 7.  :)

I’m sure I’ll probably talk/write more in the next day or two while things continue to settle in.  In the meantime, have a nice holiday (in the US)…

Halley Suitt (halleyscomment.blogspot.com):
- “The Creative Leader”
- How do you manage a creative leader?
- Are you burning them out?
- Keep teams small (two pizzas)
- “When they start to whine, they’ve lost interest” – JR
- If they don’t want to learn, get rid of them
- If you don’t train your developers, they’ll leave

Blake Ross (blakeross.com/Firefox):
- Project Goals :)
= Annihilate Bill Gates and feast on the bloody remains of his shattered empire.
= Liberate the world from the encumbering bondage of proprietary software.
- http://www.firefoxflicks.com – Whee video
- Winer starts a fight with Blake…
- Crazy uncles stick together. Winer kinda threw a wrench in the discussion. Boo.

Jeremy Zawodny (jeremy.zawondy.com):
- “Bloggers love to bitch about things”
- We don’t know what normal people do when they’re in front of their computers
- Seniors are a potential huge market. Large amount of computer users and they have the $$$
- We need to step away from our computers and look at the rest of the world and see what they’re doing

Phil Torrone (Make Magazine):
- If you can’t open it, you don’t own it
- Open standards = good
- What about open source hardware?
- We’re approaching a time where everything is programmable

Should TagJag get funded?
- Just getting started…
- Chris is offering a stake in TagJag to the Gnomedex/Braintrust community
- “What would you do with the funding?”
- “If you suck, we’ll tell you”

Dave Winer (scripting.com):
- Frightened by John Edwards on the front of the Seattle PI
- Desktop Publishing -> Web
- “Quitting blogging to do something new”

Philip “Pud” Kaplan (pud.com):
- FuckedCompany
- Building buzz on the internet
- More sites are popping up everyday, just for places to place ads
- Don’t you have any journalistic integrity? “I’m a programmer, so no.”
- Took VC money and didn’t spend it. Put it in the bank. “We’re getting 4% interest!” :)
- Building buzz: online community
- The 2 Live Crew phenomena ~ set up email address and emailed to the discussion list “It’s so fucked up, you should see this site!”
- Write about some group. Everyone from that group is going to go to that site.
- Blogs have dead-ends. Make users feel like they need to come back.
- FC had game to bet on what companies were going to go out of business.
- Mobog ~ pull pictures onto your site
- If you’re gonna plaster ads on your site and make $2.00 a day, you’re alienating yourself

Chris Messina (factoryjoe.com) and Tara Hunt (horsepigcow.com):
- “Think Small”
- “you can fail more cheaply than ever”
- nichification
- build something you need
- build it with a community
- barcamp
- winecampcalaveras.com
- Small Success
- “Succeed without a giant liquidity event”
- “the long tail is chunky”
- www.dogster.com
- www.30boxes.com
- “serve niches really well”
- The definition of success is being able to work from home, stay with my family and still make the mortgage payment (I’ll need to come back to this sometime) :)
- superhappydevhouse.org
- Gnomedex is an independent success
- Seth Godin’s “The Bootstrappers Bible” – http://www.changethis.com

Ethan Kaplan (blackrimglasses.com):
- http://murmurs.com – REM fan site
- The culture where the fan and the band are no different
- http://headautomatica.com (Official band site on left/Fan site on the right-hand side)
- site has a “what is this tagging things” help page
- “Explain Technorati to a 16 year old”
- Discussion boards and email lists don’t matter to 16 year olds anymore

Kaliya ~ Gnomedex MVP (kaliyasblogs.net):
- Communities

Chris Pirillo:
I posted a bit yesterday about how the day started over here.

Mike Arrington (of TechCruch):
The day started out with Mike Arrington of TechCrunch talking about Web 2.0 companies. He mentioned that digg.com is getting over 9 million hits a day (did I make that up? someone fact-check me!) which is starting to creep into NY Times territory. What does that mean? It means that blogs and this \”new media\” (ugh, sorry.) is starting to creep up behind these traditional media outlets. Same goes for places like YouTube, MySpace, etc.

Dave Dederer (founding member of the Presidents of the United States of America ~ the band):
Dave talked about music and technology and gave a lot of interesting insight into the life/world of a musician. He really broke down the percentages of where the money goes when you\’re in a record contract. Long story short, most musicians seem to be making their money on merchandise where they have the biggest profit-margin.

John Edwards (yes, that John Edwards):
Senator John Edwards gave a talk that was targeted towards technology and politics. It was very interesting to listen to him and for the most part, the audience was very well behaved. I genuinely believe that he was looking for some information to help him with what he might be busy working on/doing leading up to 2008. Someone mentioned having a blogger or two on the campaign bus the whole time. That would be cool.

Lunch:
I have to say that the food is very good at the conference center. It was last year and continues to be very decent for serving such a large amount of people.

Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon.com):
Werner spoke about Network Neutrality and the importance of why people should be paying attention and be concerned as to what their phone companies and cable providers are trying to do.

Steve Rubel (Micro Persuasian):
Steve spoke about marketing and using web technologies such as blogs to reach a customer audience. The topic of people blogging because of their passion for a product was brought up. Companies should embrace people like this and pay attention to those who have had negative experiences.

Marc Canter (PeopleAggregator, Marc’s Voice, etc.):
Marc had a great presentation (in typical Marc-style) where he discussed open-ness in software. “It’s not about being big or small, it’s about being open or closed.” How can you create your own clique?

Susan Mernit:
Talked about getting “personal” in your blog. I’m talking really personal…

The Bloglines Folks:
Led a session based around what people would love to see in their “dream feedreader”.

Steve Gillmor:
Talked about Attention and the Attention Operating System. If you don’t get it yet, ask Matt. He had a good explanation last night at the party. Actually, I think I have it recorded so maybe we will throw it out in part of the podcast.