Chris Pirillo is the creator of Gnomedex and is know for his TV work and his online show that is currently on his site, Lockergnome.

Last year, there was the first standing ovation at Gnomedex where the guy who drives the Mars Rover (how cool is that?) showed in his closing remarks an image of earth which was the first picture taken of our little blue marble from another planet – awesome. It got a standing ovation and took the conference to a whole new level.

This year did not disappoint and as you might have read in Ken’s recap of Day 1, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith talked about Trust Agents which is their book that just released and is now a NY Times Best Seller. It was capped at the end of the day with Drew Olanoff who I have known for a few years and first met at Podcamp Pittsburgh in 2006. He is an awesome guy and it was truly sad to hear that he had been diagnosed with Lymphoma cancer. Drew Olanoff is a community director at GOGII and currently resides in Philadelphia, PA. He has turned the unlikeliest of situations into a new media campaign based around Twitter hashtags called #blamedrewscancer. It is an awesome idea and is backed by the Livestrong Foundation showing the power of using Social Media for powerful change in this world.

Day 2 – The Awesomeness continues

Starting out, Frank Eliason from Comcast gave us an entertaining presentation on the 10 best ways to use Twitter. We had some great content all day but the last two presentations of the day just blew us all away and left our brains in a tapioca state.

Mark Horvath was up to talk about Social Media for Change. I thought that this was going to be a nice presentation on using Twitter or blogging or something. Boy was I wrong.

Mark took $45, a laptop, an iPhone and social media to develop InvisiblePeople.tv in November 2008 to tell the stories of homelessness. He showed videos of some of these “forgotten people” and truly humanized a topic that we ignore in our day to day lives. At the end of the presentation he introduced us to James, a homeless man who was looking well and working hard to get back on his feet. He was in middle of working toward saving enough money for his first and last month rent payment to get an apartment.

What do we do at Gnomedex? We take action.

Like the presentation from Beth Canter last year, this year we passed a hat around quietly on both sides of the aisle and raised $3000 in 20 minutes. Enough for James to get an apartment.

This crowd just humbles me and blows me away with each passing year.

If that didn’t make you cry, stand up and clap and feel like we can use technology to conquer any social ill, Amber Case was up to blow our minds and show us how we are almost all cyborgs or we eventually all will be.

I am very fond of Amber and she is someone that I love having a stimulating and intelligent conversation with especially over a beer. Amber is a Cyborg Anthropologist and New Media Consultant from Portland, Oregon. She founded CyborgCamp, an unconference on the future of humans and technology. She can be found online at http://www.twitter.com/caseorganic

In her talk she showed us the first cyborgs and how with all our devices that we are are pretty much a cyborg in one way. At the end of the presentation she said that she had a lot more to include but said that she “didn’t think our brains were properly formatted at this time of the day”. Awesome.

Coming Next Week – 50 people 1 question – “What Makes a Great Website”

During Gnomedex I used the Flip camera and got quick 30-60 second responses to one simple question. That question was “What Makes a Great Website”. Think of this like a video Rorschach test. Let me just say that the results were fascinating. I am still editing and should have that ready for next week.

Other great links to Gnomedex coverage:

Real Networks Recap

Thinkers and Doers

The Intersection of People and Process

Media Shift

CNN

Microsoft Surface

Tech News World

Bacon is My Enemy

So why did I go to this conference? Just what was so special about this conference that I just had to go? It was called Gnomedex and it was a conference I didn’t really understand. Along with myself, a couple of Network Solutions folks came along to help me understand what this conference was about – Steve and Shashi. I had heard it was a combination of it being a typical web conference mixed in with a heavy dose of a TED event. Turns out that the rumors were true.

Started by Chris Pirillo, this nine-year old conference brought in some interesting presenters to talk to the crowd about the Internet and technology. It didn’t focus on case studies or the latest tools or struggles plaguing companies getting into the social media realm…at least not in the first day.

While I only had the opportunity to hang out during the first day due to some schedule conflicts, I felt that Gnomedexwas a worthwhile investment in attending. The presenters that Pirillo brought to the stage, for the most part, offered their pitch that was of some interest to the audience. It all started out with Warren Etheredge giving a rousing speech on how to give an interview and how listening is something that needs to be done in order to have a successful meeting – whether you’re interviewing them or not. After that, we were treated to a talk by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith who talked to us about their new book Trust Agent and the steps needed to help build credibility with our customers.

Keep in mind that throughout these presentations, no one really mentioned things like email marketing, online advertising, social media or a website. Instead the focus is on improving yourself professionally and what is interesting today in regards to technology. All the things that Etheredge and Brogan/Smith said are completely adaptable for any facet of the technology industry and Gnomedex kept that theme going throughout the day.

There were a few science’ish type talks that were given by Phil Plait (skepticism online), Christine Peterson (life extensions for geeks), and Firas Khatib (Fold.It) and for the most part, were great talks and interesting, but probably tailored towards the wrong audience. Too much science and less relevancy towards the interests of the crowd.

Things did pick up when Bre Pettis was brought up on stage and he talked about personal manufacturing and how his company’s invention: the makerbot helps people share their wares. This is a pretty cool invention that creates 3D replicas of an image that you can mass produce to sell to your customers. After that, momentum and interest kept building up as we launched into hearing about SPAM from a “rehabilitated spammer” Todd Friesen who spoke about the techniques used by spammers to make themselves lots of money, in an aptly named presentation called “SPAM: Sites positioned above mine”.

The final presentation was given by Drew Olanoff who you may know is the guy behind the widely popular website BlameDrewsCancer.com and is himself a cancer fighter struggling to overcome this horrible disease. He gave a very rousing and sometimes emotional and passionate talk on his struggles and how he has drawn strength from his friends, family, cancer survivors and even total strangers who are supporting his cause. In the end, he was the only recipient of a standing ovation from the crowd (the second one in the past nine years of the conference).

Gnomedex definitely impressed me with its programming and the type of people it could bring in. I’ve been to a bunch of conferences over the past year and what surprised me the most is that the wireless Internet held up throughout the entire weekend – something typically unheard of. I think that Pirillo did a great job in organizing and the sponsor booths were pretty well placed and they even had a recreation booth sponsored by Microsoft Bing called the (get this) “Bing-Pong Room” that featured…ping pong under a black light. It was awesome.

When it was all said and done, I think that it was definitely a great thing for me to head up to Seattle for Gnomedex. I’m looking forward to seeing what Pirillo has in store for Gnomedex 10. I’m pretty sure that I’d be there.

Photo Credit: All photos featured here were taken by Kenneth Yeung.

It is put on by, Chris Pirillo, the Original Gnome or “OG” and his Lockergnome crew in the beautiful city of Seattle. As I said in my post last year, “I have been to many conferences in the past and I have to say this is one of the best out there. Little things like working wi-fi for everyone, power in every seat to make your liveblogging acheiveable and awesome food that you would find at really expensive conferences”. This Gnomedex should be no different. In fact there will be a few surprises for us to announce as the date gets closer.

The Network gang attending Gnomedex this year has grown to include Ken Yeung, I am sorry, “The” Ken Yeung as he is known to all his fans (including me).

Like many conferences, the best conversations are usually in the hallways and this conference is one par with SXSW in that vein. Gnomedex has actually come to be known as the “affordable TED for everyone”. I really like that and suggested three years ago that Chris call the conference “GnomeTED”. Chris limits attendance to around 350-400 which makes it possible to meet almost everyone if you work hard and he really leverages web tools to connect people and employs backchannels like IRC and Twitter live to show what people are thinking as the presenter is speaking. He also does a live video feed for fans who can’t be there.

To check out who will be there in addition to Shashi and me, here is the attendee list (another great thing that most conferences don’t do) and the agenda which is going to be entertaining and educational.

Blogging from Gnomedex

We will be blogging from the conference every day (Thursday-Saturday) and capturing lots of interviews that should be rolling off the presses for publishing next week and into September. Ken will also be taking lots of awesome pictures that will be part of a Flickr feed we will have online soon.

Special Gnomedex Offer

We will be announcing a special offer for  Gnomedex attendees and those watching the event online can take advantage of for a limited time. More details to come on that soon.

If you want to follow the happenings at the conference check out twitter and friendfeed which should be quite busy starting Thursday evening.

So what’s some of the takeaways from attending an event like WordCamp? Well you have a wide array of speakers. I know that during the most recent WordCamp in Baltimore (WordCamp Mid-Atlantic), the great organizers had Anil Dash from SixApart (a competitor to WordPress) give a keynote there that made it interesting to hear. At WordCamp SF, the speakers were just as great. The attendees were treated to great speeches by some of these speakers:

- Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Work Week who spoke about scalable blogging.

- Matt Cutts from Google on how to use WordPress efficiently to increase your page rank.

- Tara Hunt, author of The Whuffie Factor who spoke about how to build social capital.

- Chris Pirillo, organizer of Gnomedex who spoke on building community.

- Scott Porad of I Can Has Cheezburger fame spoke about user-generated content.

- John Lilly from Mozilla on lessons learned.

Overall WordCamp was a real big success. There was a lot of hallway networking and the food was delicious – the Automattic team had brought in all-you-can-eat barbeque. And would you believe it, but the Wi-Fi connection at the venue we were at actually held up? You had no problems connecting to the Internet at all, but unfortunately there weren’t enough electrical outlets. However, that didn’t damper the enthusiasm of the crowd.

I attended most of the sessions and found them quite informative. While I did miss Tim Ferriss’s talk (I was volunteering at the registration table in the early morning), I did hear good things about it. The first session I did attend was from Matt Cutts and it spoke to me on leveraging the tools that are offered on WordPress and how to view tag and optimize your blog posts effectively. An interesting exercise that took place was when Matt took out what is commonly known as a “thumb drive”. We were to talk to our neighbor and see what they would call it & keywords like “jump drive”, “memory stick”, “USB drive”, etc – the point being that everyone labels things differently so you need to account for that when choosing your keywords. Just because you think it’s called a scientific term does not mean it’ll be the same for your audience. Take advantage of tags, categories, post titles and your permalinks when blogging.

Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress, was up next with his State of the Word where he talks about what’s up & coming with WordPress. He delved deep into the history of where WordPress has gone over the past six years (he was quick to point out that it was their sixth anniversary). A couple of things that he brought up was that while there’s an existing iPhone application that will let bloggers post via mobile device, there’s another update coming soon. But, not to let the Blackberry users feel left out, a blogging application will soon be released as well for those phones. But perhaps the biggest news from Mullenweg was that WordPressMU (multi-users) and WordPress.org were going to merge, thereby making it easier for people to handle their blogs.

After Mullenweg’s keynote & lunch, the sessions began again and Tara Hunt is on stage. Hunt is the author of the acclaimed book The Whuffie Factor and also is one of the owners of a popular co-working space in San Francisco, called Citizen Space. Her presentation was pretty much on how you can achieve your goals online but in order to do that, you need whuffie – this is basically social capital. You need to build up your “street cred” so to speak & there are five parts to having that whuffie:

1. listen and don’t interrupt,
2. be a part of the community,
3. create an amazing feeling,
4. embrace the chaos,
5. find a purpose

Her books is available now and I’ll be exploring how you can find whuffie in other posts.

There were a couple of sessions that I didn’t really enjoy and didn’t see how they related to blogging, but for the most part the rest of the program was outstanding.

Perhaps the biggest session that I thought was outstanding was Chris Pirillo’s talk on community. He understood how to build one and explained to the attendees that it wasn’t about having an artificial community, because those don’t exist. Rather, you are engaging your customers and nature and the societal culture will dictate whether a community is formed. You are in it for them not for yourself. A community is built on common interests and if you try to create one or even force it, you’ll never succeed. Let everything take its own course.

The end of WordCamp resulted in mass traffic jams out of the parking garage but I felt that everyone was pleasantly happy with what was presented. For me, I enjoyed the networking opportunities that were presented along with the information given by the speakers. If you think that you might go to one next time, then you should really think about it. For $25, everything I’ve mentioned to you above is included. So when you go back, you will have helpful insights, good resources, and have made more friends.

So sayeth WordCamp.

It is put on by, Chris Pirillo, the Original Gnome or “OG” as I like to call him and his wife Ponzi in the beautiful city of Seattle. I have been to many conferences in the past and I have to say this is one of the best out there. Little things like working wi-fi for everyone, power in every seat to make your liveblogging acheiveable and awesome food that you would find at really expensive conferences.

Like many conferences, the best conversations are usually in the hallways and this conference is one par with SXSW in that vein. Chris limits attendance to around 350-400 which makes it possible to meet almost everyone if you work hard and he really leverages web tools to connect people and employs backchannels like IRC and Twitter live to show what people are thinking as the presenter is speaking. He also does a live video feed for fans who can’t be there.

To check out who will be there in addition to Shashi and me, here is the attendee list (another great thing that most conferences don’t do) and the agenda which is going to be entertaining and educational.

Live Blogging

We will be blogging from the conference every day (Thursday-Saturday) and capturing lots of interviews that should be rolling off the presses for publishing next week and into September.

If you want to follow the happenings at the conference check out twitter and friendfeed which should be quite busy starting Thursday evening.