Gnomedex was amazing, and Saturday was a particularly rewarding day. Take Julie Leung’s talk, for starters. She inspired me to do more than think of my blog as a place to dump text. I want to learn to treat this space with more respect, thought, and care.

At lunch, I sat next to Eric Rice, who talked about how blogs are failing him; this was a revelation. Blogs are conversations, truly, and the problem of how to manage your reader’s experience, how to direct them and give them a structure for understanding your content when they may be stepping into the middle of a conversation… this problem is no small thing.

Evelyn Rodriguez was sitting next to Eric, and she and I ended up in an extended and wide ranging conversation which touched on a lot of ideas and feelings that I haven’t thought about for a while: the work of Joseph Campbell, following your passion, answering the call, bringing heart and soul and humanity back into business… Evelyn taught me about the Jonah complex, and the concept of post-traumatic growth. We talked far past lunch and I ended up missing at least two conference sessions, but I wouldn’t have traded our time for anything. I have seen Evelyn’s name many times in several of the blogs I really like, and I had not taken the time to sample her writing. I’m just digging in now, and finding how much this incredible person has to offer.

Adam Curry’s keynote touched on similar themes, on the idea that what the new technology is enabling is for people to express their passion, to bypass TV and radio’s “hitmaker syndrome” and to become a place where people can advocate for the things they love. He called on users and developers to keep pushing, to try on each other’s perspectives and work together to get this new media revolution in full swing.

The whole weekend was about passion, in the end. Gnomedex 5.0 was full of people who are passionate about what they do. They are unwilling to accept the status quo. They need to move things forward, to make a change in the world, to evolve.

The most incredible thing was how… for the most part… ego-less the whole place seemed. The attendees seemed to revel in each others’ presence. They wanted to learn from each other, and they wanted to share what they knew without restriction, as if they realized that the only way they could grow as individuals was to grow as a community.

Perhaps I’m romanticizing things a bit. I’m still being rocked by the waves of energy, still swirling in that whirlpool of motion, so perhaps I’m not entirely clear-headed, but there’s no doubt that something amazing happened this weekend. I bumped into Jeff Barr on the way to my car on Saturday night. He’s got a million times more juice in the community that I do, and he was buzzing as much as I was. He said, “No matter what you do, what these other guys in the room are doing is 20 times cooler.” Everyone seemed to feel that respect and awe for each other.

For me, personally, this weekend was a significant experience. About a year ago, I blogged about a post that Hugh MacLeod wrote. In it, Hugh said, “the old ways are dead, and you need people around you who concur.” Back then, I wrote that “people who think the world is changing surround themselves with people who think the world is changing… these people change the world.”

I’ve been searching ever since that day to find the people who concur that the old ways are dead. Wonder of wonders, I found them at Gnomedex.

Awesome!

Chris Pirillo has a great logo for Gnomedex. It’s a cartoon caricature of his face, and I’m looking at it all day on the big banner hanging next to the speakers.

Thing is, it’s got a big Registered Trademark logo under it. What up with that, Chris? Why won’t you release your face under Creative Commons? Let us share and remix your face.

Come on. Even Microsoft is doing it.

Julie Leung just gave a very powerful talk about the social and personal aspects of blogging. I haven’t read her blog before, but now I’m very much looking forward to digging in.

One of the real poignant things that came to me while watching her presentation is the dichotomy between the cold, technical side of computers and technology and the warm, aesthetic things that are possible with this technology. Blogs to me are like grass growing through cracks in the concrete. It’s the deep human need for expression coming through in everything humans do.

Hobie Swan from Mindjet is demonstrating his visual outlining program. It looks wicked cool. The Mac version (and the Mac tablet?) can’t come soon enough for me.

Your front page has to have a Download button, screen shots, and two sentences that tell people why they have to have this software right now!

And make it sexy. A sexy website, a sexy logo.

And listen to your audience—your actual audience, your end users.

And communicate—through a blog or whatever.

And don’t want to buy a Porsche.

Interesting. Dan Gilmore’s suggesting making videos of community theatre and making them available on Bit Torrent. He suggests that they may find a much bigger audience than would otherwise be there. What a cool idea.

Asa Dotzler (roughly): Given the choice between hearing what Ford Motor Company has to say about its product and what a million Ford customers have to say, I think people will opt to hear what the million customers have to say.

Doug Kaye made the point that iTunes is going to start launching to 100,000,000 podcast listeners. Dave Winer is arguing that we shouldn’t be interested in getting into the mainstream or hitting a large number of listeners, as if that would validate what we’re doing.

To me, RSS, the net, the web… all this stuff is roads & rails. If you don’t have enough roads and enough rails, you don’t have enough traffic to drive business. You can’t carry your content anywhere.

Popularity is a reflection of the extent of the infrastructure you’ve created. The bigger the infrastructure, the more stuff can happen.

It’s roads and rails, baby. Let’s build roads and rails.

Dean’s Hachamovitch from MS. Coupla good laughs early. Good work. Like the artist’s rendering of Microsoft’s campus (it’s the Death Start II). Funny ha-ha. Maybe Microsoft understands how they’re viewed in the world and have a healthy sense of humor about it. Maybe. Maybe it just kind of looks that way.

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We’re the first public audience to see IE 7. First impressions: it looks a lot like Firefox. Of course, it’s not finished yet. Things will move around. Really, how original can you get with a browser?

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So IE can automatically sniff RSS and view it in the browser. Their RSS view looks EXACTLY like Safari’s. Hmmmm…

Maybe I’m being a little unfair, but what these guys are talking isn’t that big a deal. I’m doing the same stuff on the Mac and I’m doing it now, not at the end of 2006.

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So here’s the key insight from Microsoft. All applications should natively understand what a “subscription” means and know how to deal with it. I think this is right on. Downloading will be done at the platform level, meaning applications will make a call to the built-in downloading service to get feeds, enclosures, etc. Applications will dip into this pool, or stream, of data. To the user, it’s a seamless experience. Very cool.

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There’s a little hostility towards the MS guys from the crowd, particularly from one Mac guy. I don’t think contention is the right tactic to engage the MS guy, but there is a little bit of an attitude that’s being presented by MS that they’re doing something really cool and forward-thinking, when it looks to many of us that they’re really just catching up. I think the hostility might be coming from the attitude that they’re telling us something new.

Here’s the problem: Microsoft looks like they’re not really aware of what state of the art technology looks like. They look like they’re behind the curve. They’d be better off, in my opinion, acknowledging what’s already available to bleeding edge techno-nerds, and start explaining how they’re going to make it bigger, better, and available to more folks.

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MS will be making their RSS extension specs available under Creative Commons. Very, very cool.

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Note to Dean, if, as you said, you’re interested in starting conversations, you’re going to have to participate in them, not shut down people who are poking at you. You look defensive. Not that I’d want to be up there in your place, but you have to recognize that the hostility is part of the conversation. You can’t just pretend it will go away. You have to listen deeply, figure out what people are hostile about, and respond to that. You’re shutting people down, but you need these folks, at the end of the day, to work with you.

Microsoft has a PR problem. In terms of how they’re presenting themselves to their public, they’re trotting out these scrubbed, clean-cut, Disney-esque, passive-agressive pretty boys to sell their products (and I think that this is kind of they way they act in the world—clean cut, coy, but they might just pull a fast one on you.) What they need is a fighter, a passionate advocate. Someone who thrives in the hostility, can see the other side, and can really engage.

They need to clone Scoble.

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Steve Rubel says, “This is Embrace and Extend Lite™.” In other words, it’s a good start, but we’re not convinced.