Gnomedex Coverage: Save the Earth, Evangelize Your Company, Protect Your Identity and Party Like its 1994
This was my first Gnomedex and I have to say, I understand why everyone says it is one of the few must attend conferences. Here are some of the highlights from day 1:
Save the Earth
Robert Steele, former spook, part analyst, part futurist, part conspiracy theorist and a whole lot of angry took the room to task with how he could solve America’s financial problems with about $6 billion dollars and the elimination of the Federal Reserve. When he made the statement that Lincoln and Kennedy both wanted to print money and look where that got them but couldn’t discuss the connection, he lost me.
Evangelize Your Company
The presentation by Guy Kawasaki was considered by many as the real keynote. In a very energized presentation in typical light text, great speaking style, Guy discussed the 9 tenets of
evangelism, most important was to Make Meaning, Demo Often and Beware of Bozos.
I like that Guy called himself a bozo because he turned down being CEO of Yahoo and would have turned down Facebook and Google too. The lesson here, don’t dismiss to something so quickly because it might be the next revolutionary product.
Protect Your Identity
Vanessa Fox gave an interesting talk on managing your identity online. She talked about how her name had been smeared and someone was using her name with the word “nude” and upon search would send you to an ad spam site. So this is why she decided to name her blog “Vanessa Fox. Nude.” and it has given rise to the discussion of how much do you share online. The talk was a true conversation with the audience and the first of the day (at 3pm!). People discussed their profiles, getting their blogs stolen, putting up photos of family and how much harder it will get as time and technology evolves and pervades into all parts of our lives. This was a great one.
Party Like it’s 1994
With a good presentation, there must always be one to balance it out. With Jason Calcanis taking the stage, it started out good and looked like he was going to parallel Al Gore’s pollution of the planet speech with a pollution of the Internet via spam and bad search criteria. The crown soon turned on him as he created “conference spam” by turning his time at the podium into an infomercial on his new venture. If you want a good review of why Mahalo will sink then check out Technosailor’s review of this site.
Well, it is Gnomedex Day 2 and it looks to be an interesting day. Here is my short summary:
Bad Presentation: Cali Lewis and Husband
The morning started off in what seemed to be a funny husband and wife routine and how-to on video podcasting. It soon turned into a disorganized giggle fest with ramblings about their lives. It is a great
Open Source Money
In a presentation befitting of TED, Michael Linton spoke about the concept of Open Money. It is basically socialism meets money. Way over my head. Wanna learn more? Go to Wikipedia here.
I don’t have any other reviews since the rest of the day for me was spent watching Kris Smith podcast live from the show and here are the sessions. I am in one and so are some great Gnomedexers.
All in all, this was a great conference with the best conversations out in the hallway and at the bar. I made a lot of great friends, hung out with the B5 crew and fell in love with a city (Seattle). I will definitely be
