Well, its the final day of Gnomdex 2008. It was a late night for most who went to the party at Showbox, a Seattle landmark where I personally have seen Pearl Jam, Mudhoney and Nirvana in my much younger, grungier, and thinner days.

We jumped right in with another presentation of more highlights from Ignite Portland and Josh Bancroft

Heated Discussion with Sarah Lacy and my fellow Gnomedexers

With a presentation switched at the last minute on Chris Pirillo and titled “What Happens When You Get What You Want: The Growing Blogosphere Angst” it was appropriate irony. She got what she wanted and most of the crowd gave her alot of angst. As merely an observer, which I will get to in a minute, it was supposed to be a walk the crowd format similar to Oprah, but it soon turned into the Jerry Springer show.

There is extremely good coverage of this particular session by cNet.com, especially the heated discussion shown in the picture above with Sarah Lacy and Geoff Livingston.

Managing Online Relationships with Eve Maler of Sun Microsystems

To change things for a more calmer discussion, Eve Maler of Sun Microsystems was next up. She presented her take on Vendor Relationship Management and the issues and opportunities it shares with other disciplines; here are her slides. In summary, VRM is similar to CRM but the difference is that there a mutually beneficial data sharing relationship that people would have. There are new data standards that take data sharing while being secure to a whole new level. I invite you to review her slides or go to her blog to learn more.

The Adeona Project – “LoJack for your computer”

Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there’s no need to rely on a single third party. What’s more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner’s choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop.

They described the motivation, design, and evolution of the Adeona laptop tracking service, as well as briefly give a high-level description of some of our other pursuits in academic computer security research. They also gave some hints of what’s in store for future versions of Adeona.

With that, we are ready for lunch. In the next post we will cover the afternoon sessions and have some closing thoughts on the overall conference.