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.

I got to meet some new people and reconnect with old friends. One of the new friends I made was Giovanni Galluci of Viewzi, a Dallas-based startup. They are doing some cool stuff with search and have a killer interface. They are a “ridiculously visual search engine” according to Giovanni and function on a meta level. This means they work with numerous search engines and interpret the search and present in the most relevant way. You should check out Viewzi yourself to get the full picture and see how awesome this search tool is for everyone. Check out my inteview with him below:

This past August, Shashi Bellamkonda (AKA Social Media Swami) and I had the opportunity to attend Gnomedex 2008. Gnomedex is like the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) in that it has innovative speakers, a cutting edge variety of topics and is focused in one track. It is different in that anyone can come, costs $500 vs $8000 (for TED) to come and everyone is accessible. It is put on by Chris and Ponzi Pirillo who are wonderful people and put on one of the best events of the year.

I was able to spend some time with Greg and he shared some important advice on creating great email campaigns:

- Sponsoring Events is important for branding and being an influencer

- The basis of all successful email campaigns start with a great database

- There must be frequency (but not too much) with relevant content along with functional opt-in/opt-out capabilities.

They also launched a few months ago their blog for customers and practitioners in the email marketing space. It is called “The Thinking Inbox“. Check it out but before you do, check out the full interview below:

Above are Chris Pirillo, his wife Ponzi and Kat who works for Chris. They are the three that held the center tight so everything around did not fall apart. Here are some highlights of people there that evening:

Robert Scoble, meet the Robert Scoble of Network Solutions

In a funny exchange, Shashi met Robert Scoble and talked about our work on Solutions Are Power, I interjected that everyone calls him the “Robert Scoble” of Network Solutions. He jokingly said, “be careful you don’t fired” but was really glad to see a company like Network Solutions using social media to reach out to customers and evangelize what we do here. Below is a picture of the two Robert Scobles. I will leave it to you to figure out which one is the real Robert Scoble.

The two funniest guys in the room discuss social media

Dave Delaney and Chris Brogan are funny dudes. Both are passionate about social media and are very successful evangelists for the companies they work for. They are also really funny.

I met Dave for the first time here at Gnomedex 2008 and he has traveled all over the world and even to Ireland where he met his wife – who is from Tennessee. I mean, he goes all the way across the world to find and marry another American. There is a joke in there somewhere. It is the reason that he lives in Nashville and just got a job as the social media guy for Griffin, the iPod accessory people.

Chris Brogan is Social Media. As the originator of Podcamp Boston he is someone who has been at the center of the social media tornado these last few years. His personal blog ChrisBrogan.com has 8000 subscribers and his work on events for his company, CrossTech Media, allows him to put together events with serious social media angles.

Both guys were talking about the future of social media and how this year’s Gnomedex compared to last year’s. For a great perspective on this year to last year’s event, check out Chris’ post.

I am turning in early while most are still going until close. Looking forward to a fantastic second day at Gnomedex 2008. See you in the morning.

We have shown you the tools now go out and use them

Many conferences have been about educating and evangelizing to people how they should use tools like blogs, podcasts and social networks. There has definitely been a shift in the winds. At this point, people who want to know about them or learn about them, have at some level. Now it is not about education but about implementation and adoption. I think you will see this trend continue at future conferences, but you saw it first here at Gnomedex.

You can use this technology to not only build your business but make positive change in the world

From watching Beth Kanter raise $3700 to send a girl in Cambodia to college, to using Twitter to get a audience following the Mars Rover, to Salaam Garage using social media tools on their photo/video trips, everyone can use these tools to make a difference in this world. All of the attention for these projects and their popularity would not have been possible with out tools like blogs, podcasts, twitter and flickr to name a few.

Everyone needs to go next year – yes, everyone.

Chris Brogan summed it up the best in his post “I found Gnomedex to be the single-most valuable conference for me and my own personal and professional development that I’ve attended in the last 12 months. (In saying this, I realize that I’m rating it over my very own PodCamp Boston and several other events where I know and love the organizers. To you, I say, “I loved your events as well. They were also useful to me.”)

It will be interesting to see what comes next year, and I will certainly plan to attend. You should, too.”

See you next year for Gnomedex 2009.

Next up was Tara Hunt who is with Ma.gnolia and they announced that they are going completely open source which should take their product to the next level. They are going to be the wordpress of social bookmarking allowing people to download and start their own social bookmarking platform. It was a good presentation about why being open gives you more power with the community you are trying to work with.

After a little coffee break we were entertained by Ben Huh of icanhazceezburger.com which talked about the evolution of memes and the humor that can be funnier with the use of social media and the power of community. If you haven’t ever checked out that site or the original LOLCats.com with captions under funny pictures you are missing out on a core part of the funny side of the Internet. I love good presentations and his slides used the eras of grow for the site in one word formats like the site, for example “icantgetanysleep” or “programmatica” eras. He used lots of pictures and few words which made his talk funny and impactful. These are good lessons for any business person that has to present a topic that is left of center and needs to be recieved by everyone.

Last before lunch was Danny Sullivan on how using search can meet real life. He touched upon a couple of important points:

“It’s easy to underestimate the importance of search in our everyday lives. Only a few years after search engines arrived, they had replaced friends, books and libraries as the top resource people used to answer questions. Today, the frequencies of daily search use continues to rise — as does what you can find in search engines.

If you look at how the real world – rather than just the “web world” – is increasingly becoming searchable, and at the impact this has. Is Google StreetView cool until it’s your house that’s showing up? Should people be able to pull material even if it’s “public” in other ways? Do we need to better understand how revealing search can be about ourselves, in particular when so many are now Twittering and Flickring their private lives?

And what happens as search continues to jump off our web browser and into our televisions, iPhones and GPS units. These bring us a world of new search opportunities, such as location-specific restaurant search — but they also open new concerns about the search records and profiles left behind. After exploring some of the issues, plenty of time for audience discussion.”

Great session and now it’s time for a great lunch, networking and video interviews of some of the attendees.

Next is going to be coverage of the afternoon sessions. Stay Tuned.

For those of you who don’t know Kris, he is a fashion and editorial photographer based in Vancouver, British Columbia, and founder of photography studio Static Photography.

He is an author, having co-written BitTorrent for Dummies with Susannah Gardner, and a technologist. He was also the president of Bryght (a Drupal development company) and founder of early web community spark-online.com. Now he is president of Raincity Studios who acquired bryght some months ago. Raincity studios is the A-Z supplier of web services from planning to development to implementation to hosting.

Krug is the organizer and founder of PhotoCamp, a photography unconference with BarCamp origins, and has organized 5 of them including Northern Voice 2006, BarCamp Shanghai, Barcamp Vancouver, Northern Voice 2007 and Northern Voice 2008.

Krug is a well known contributor to the Flickr photo sharing community website. His photographs have appeared in JPG Magazine, ION Magazine, Business Week, Wired Magazine, and others. He has published interviews with technology personalities in Digital Web Magazine, and he has covered events as diverse as SXSW, the 2006 Winter Olympics, and the Consumer Electronics Show. He has been a regular guest on The Lab with Leo, a talk show devoted to technology and its effects on the G4Tech channel talking about topics like Facebook apps to the growing Chinese market. As a speaker, he has been invited to a number of media and technology events, such as SXSW.

He just got back from Beijing and taking photos at the Olympics. His big piece of advice that was non-technical was to find a theme of your pictures (faces, reflections) to find a style that people will recognize your work. Plus, and most of all, take photos every day if you want to get good.

Here is a great summary of his tips for everyone with any kind of camera:

Tips:
1. Light in someone’s eyes (that little twinkle in person’s eye)
2. Evaluate the light
- Sun? Shade? Incandescent. Halogen?
- Look around – highlights, shadows, spotlights
- Put your subject in good light

- Work with Whatcha Got
3. Shoot in Low Light/Available Light
- Sometimes don’t use flash
- Increase your ISO (ASA)
- Increase your aperture (F-stop) make it lower 1.2, 1.4, 2.8
- Decrease your shutter speed
- Focus manually if autofocus fails you
- Tinker with manual setting/metering
- Brace on things (tripod, gear bag)
4. Reflections are Yummy!
- Puddles
- Glass
- etc.
5. Pick a theme
- ex: Gnomedex Wall of Love
- Poloroids
- Portraits
- Black & White/Sepia/Over-exposed
- Laptop Stickers/Geeks & Gear
- Funny Faces
6. Learn your camera
- Isolate the variables – depth of field, shutter speed, aperture, ISO, etc.
- Tinker, tweek, shoot lots, share your photos, get feedback, change it up
- Share your gear – find someone you can test out lenses, flashes, etc. with
- SET THE WHITE BALANCE!!!

To check out his work, head on over to his Flickr site and start drooling.

We saw lots of old friends and met many new ones. Sara Lacy was here promoting her new book and participating in the Gnomedex chat room with all the attendees as they came by. HP is here showing off their new laptops and touch desktop which was very cool.

Gotta get some rest for tomorrow but to keep you all in the loop, below is a photo feed of Gnomedex8 which has tons of pictures from the party and as time goes by will have more from the sessions.

Tomorrow we will be covering some of the sessions and posting various video interviews Shashi and I do with the speakers and attendees.