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.

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Awesome!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. --- We're the first public audience to see IE 7. First impressions: it looks a lot like Firefox.

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