This summer, hundreds of the world’s leading bloggers, podcasters, and tech-savvy enthusiasts will once again descend upon the city of Seattle, Washington. The eighth Gnomedex conference is generating buzz in the blogosphere, which underscores our reason to produce it. Indeed, we will once again become the crossroads between producers and observers, between users and developers. Register Now!
Who? Influencers, Entrepreneurs, and Tech Enthusiasts!
What? A confluence of leading bloggers and new media!
When? August 21st – 23rd, 2008!
Where? Bell Harbor Conference Center in Seattle, WA!
Why? Because all things are possible!
We’ll be in downtown Seattle
Breakfast, lunch, and snacks are included
Tags are “Gnomedex” and/or “Gnomedex2008″
What Do You Get?
A single-track conference with quality content
A full conference pass
Breakfast, lunch, snacks, and beverages (unlimited)
Wi-Fi, professionally managed
Your own electrical outlet for power
The official Gnomedex t-shirt
Business networking opportunities
Free online promotion in the Gnomedex Blogroll… and more!
Why Attend Gnomedex?
Business Models Brought to Life
Movers, Shakers, & Deal Makers
A tap into the Conversation Economy
Thought Leaders, Industry Influencers, Entrepreneurs
Sarah’s session at Gnomedex 8.0 reminds me of the story of the dog who catches the car and thinks, “now what?” She writes:
In the early days of the blogging revolution it was all about aggregating a mass niche into a powerful force that could rival the world’s biggest entertainment, news, and technology brands. We did it. Maybe not each one of us, but collectively. Look at Huffington Post or DailyKos or Drudge Report and the force they wield on politics. Look at how TechCrunch has out-new-economied cNet. And of course there’s Perez Hilton and the Gawker Empire– forces that have knocked tabloids back on their heels.
Of course, we all know it’s community and content that’s made this happen more than it is the code. But what happens when you get too much of a big thing? Does community scale? Or does it break down? Having proven they can grab as large of a megaphone as they want, some of the Internet famous are choosing to step back – burned out from the work, pressure and scrutiny. Making matters worse, many bloggers have been manipulated into being tools of the very powerbrokers they were trying to disrupt.
Is there a way to value sites off more than just size? Can new business models bring our priorities back in line and can tools like video commenting bring humanity to the anonymous snarky world of blog commenters?
Nathan Wade’s Serial Cyborg is a synthesis of art and technology that will make your head explode.
Serial Cyborg is a DICOM Voxel Based MRI wood sculpture, cut by an industrial CNC mill. The sculpture explores persistent physical distortion through a simple gestural movement; a serialization of human interplay with particle reality as machine visualizable data and re-instantiation of these streams into physical space. This artwork also aims to explore the notion of the modern human as Cyborg, augmented and abstracted through technology while engaging hybrid human definition. The synthesis of digital revealing and informing the physical, irrevocably altering both as extension of the other.
Xmlgrrl Eve Maler’s session at Gnomedex 8.0 will look at the tradeoffs we make when doing business online:
When dealing with websites and online vendors of all sorts, the price we’re forced to pay in order to get differentiated service is to “hand over the data” – data about us that’s sensitive, valuable, and personal. It fragments not only the pieces of information that represent us online, and not only our sense of control, but our actual influence over these relationships.
The Vendor Relationship Management movement has captured the imagination of many individuals who want a more equal partnership with their online partners, and many vendors who want to attract customers more successfully. Do “classic” user-centric identity approaches change the balance of power, or just make it easier for us to consent to data-sharing we have no say in anyway? We’ll look at new approaches that may help to create an ecosystem of greater mutual respect among all online parties.
Beth Kanter has a great story about tapping her social network in service of a good cause. At Gnomedex 8.0, she’ll tell us how she poked, prodded, tweeted, blogged and mobilized a networked army of supporters to rally their friends and personal networks and raise over $90,000 for Cambodian Orphans, winning the #1 spot for Global Causes for America’s Giving Challenge in January 2008. Come hear the story and the learn the secrets of success for socially-networked, person-to-person fundraising. Hopefully, you will leave the room inspired and ready to use social media for good!
Arvind Krishnamurthy received his PhD from UC, Berkeley, was on faculty at Yale, and joined UW faculty in 2005. He works primarily at the boundary between the theory and practice of distributed systems and computer networks. His current research interests include peer-to-peer systems, Internet measurements, systems security, and network protocol design.
The summer I turned 11, I went to a camp for “gifted and talented” students. It was located in the North Carolina mountains, on the campus of Western Carolina University. Camp Cullowhee was an introduction for me, in many ways, to the geek life I would later come to embrace. It was there that I used my first mainframe computer, played my first text adventure game, and uncovered the secrets of an old tone generator. The machine in question looked like a World War II-era telephone switchboard, and it required the operator to spend 20 minutes or so patching cables and tuning dials and switches in order to produce crude tones of various shapes and frequencies. You could make interesting effects with the device; nothing like music. But I did learn quite a bit about square waves and sine waves and filters and so forth.
This experience came flooding back to me when I watched this video of a reactable.
As a computer and music nerd, I find this absolutely fascinating. Not only is the effect mesmerizing, the promise of an affordable computer interface that isn’t a mouse or keyboard is a tantalizing prospect. The original reactable is only partly open source, but Gnomedex 8.0 speaker Arick Lindross has apparently built his own version of the software and will be releasing it to the world soon.
To trip a little further into my childhood memories, our class at camp got the unparalleled privilege of visiting Robert Moog at his home studio. We were given a demo of the then-unknown Fairlight CMI, and, if memory serves, I was prompted to tell Mr. Moog a little about my adventures with the tone generator back on campus. As I watched the videos of the reactable in action, I thought that Moog would have loved it. And, what do you know: there’s a video of Moog himself (~10MB .mov) playing with an early version of the device!
In her post Blogging’s Crossroads, Sarah Lacy contemplates whether blogging can or should continue to strive for size. Do communities and conversations scale? At what point does the cost of the noise outweigh the benefit of the signal?
Taking Jason Calacanis’s recent retirement from blogging as her launching pad, Sarah writes about a kind of mid-life crisis moment for bloggers. So many successful bloggers have proven that they can build an audience, rack up page views, make money — in short, meet all the objective criteria for success in modern publishing. But many of those bloggers are starting to ask, “is it all worth it?”
Perhaps it is time to step back and figure out what’s possible in this new landscape. Can we maintain conversation and community at a large scale without things devolving into chaos? Is beating the CNNs and CNETs at their own mass-market game what we really want, or do we need to go back to the idea of finding our niche?
As a journalist whose outlets reach both large and small audiences, Sarah is uniquely suited to tease out the subtleties of these conundrums. We’re looking forward to having this conversation with her at Gnomedex 8.0.
Hey, everyone. I’m Stuart Maxwell. I’ve been helping Chris and Ponzi behind the scenes as we’re getting everything ready to go for Gnomedex 8.0. I’m kind of the “Gnomedex Combobulator.” Questions about conference logistics? Need to know where to stay in Seattle? Something go cattywampus with your Eventbrite registration? I’m your man. If it’s discombobulated, I can combobulate it.
Chris has also asked me to write a bit on the blog here about what’s coming up at this year’s get-together, and I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to do so. I’m really excited about the speaker and attendee lineup that’s coming together. From internet black holes to social search, from the Third World here on earth to worlds beyond, the content this year will be every bit as rich and diverse as at Gnomedexes past.
One of the emerging themes of the talks at Gnomedex 8.0 is technology in the real world; the “applied internet,” if you will. Some of this year’s speakers are doing things like building 3D fabricators, creating snap-together components that allow you to make any kind of gadget you fancy, and making music with a juiced-up light table. I mean, seriously… how cool is that!?
Of course, anyone who’s been to Gnomedex before (this’ll be my fourth go-round; you?) knows that the speakers are only part of what makes this conference great. Take a look over there in the sidebar; see that growing roster of attendees? Those are the folks who make Gnomedex truly special. What will they be talking about? What are they creating? There’s one sure way to find out, and it starts with the words in yellow at the top of this page.
Over the next few weeks I’ll try to whet your appetite for what you’ll experience at Gnomedex. Smart, savvy, bleeding-edge early adopters that you are, you don’t need me to invite you to the conversation. Just know that, along with Chris and Ponzi, I’ll be monitoring the usual internet hangouts (Twitter, Friend Feed, the comment stream here, and so forth), listening for the things that excite you, the ideas that inspire you, the reasons you want to come to Seattle in August and hang around all these other creative, fascinating technologists and entrepreneurs.
It’s 34 days until Gnomedex, but the hallway conversations start now.
