Appropriately enough, Gnomedex 06 commenced with Dave Winer presenting a Washington State Proclamation: June 30, July 1st, 2006: RSS Days, directly from the office of Washington State Governor Christine O. Gregoire. What pull.
With a larger-than-life sized banner of Pirillo's head, Chris welcomed all of us cool geeks to Gnomedex with a handy safety video. Highly entertaining.
To touch on a few of the speakers and topics of the day:
David Dederer of Pyramid Communications, and rockstar of The Presidents of the United States of America fame, was a treat, guitar in hand. We were serenaded with a little Velvet Underground to highlight the communication divide he feels there is between music and the bloggesphere. On the one hand, there's the whole Andy Warhol mentality, sharing and love and openness, partying in New York City, copyright-free: [song lyric omitted]. But it's really like this: [song lyric omitted].
"Being closed, really, is the opposite of being open"
I'm awake! Marc Canter of Broadband Mechanics takes to the stage and barks, "I'm about open standards". We would not be sitting here today if it wasn't for RSS. "It's not about being big or small - it's about being open or closed."
Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon brought reality to the forefront: the inevitability of the cable and phone companies controlling and changing the internet. Very limited broadband access leaves Americans with no room to play. Hey, let's talk to the politicians - there just happens to be a rather hefty one here at the conference...
Our Keynote Speaker waltzed in with a fresh, lively glow, looking like he had just stepped off a sailboat. Lucky for us to have an opportunity to speak directly to a person with some serious influence, who is asking for our knowledge on how to best apply technology and incorporate everything web 2.0 into what he does. Senator John Edwards wanted to have an open conversation with all of us, with the objective to learn and gain some further insight. He will shift the way politicians campaign, for one. He's already got a podcast. Unfortunately for him, and for us, he spoke and fielded questions about politics the majority of the time. Bound to happen I suppose. Don't get me wrong - I could listen to him on politics for hours, but I think that was a slightly missed opportunity on our part. The cool thing is, he's now plugged into this whole web community - this can only be a good thing.
The end of the day saw a couple of product launches. Blue Dot seems pretty cool. The essence of this system is about creating a dot and connecting the dots of social discovery: connecting friends and learning more from and about your friends. It kind of reminds me of those forwarded long and torturous 82-questions emails to fill out info on yourself; things from your favourite colour to your greatest fear. But this is a much cooler version of all that. Check it out.
And now that he's gone from Microsoft, does Robert Scoble really believe that Office is dead...?
Conference pics have already started to pile up in flickr.
Listen Live to the whole darn conference if ya couldn't make it here!
Thanks Andre Charland for the pic. Check more of his Gnomedex stream here.