My review of Gnomedex 8.0

Sunday, August 24th, 2008
by Mark Carras

So I had a few agendas for my time at Gnomedex. First off was to network with as many people as I could and establish as many relationships with as many people in the tech world as I could. Second, I wanted to learn some things I would not be able to learn otherwise. Those two goals were reached in spades! Gnomedex is something everyone that deals with the internet should attend. This means every programmer, every blogger, every online journalist (that doesn’t want to take on the term blogger for some reason), and many others whose entire industries are drowning fast because they are so afraid of technology. Yes, I am talking about everyone that is involved with the music industry from labels, press agents, musicians, and everyone else.

Now some may look at the price and freak out. Why so damn much!? $600 may seem like a good chunk of money, but here is why it is worth it. My wife (The Queen Of Cheese herself) packed all kinds of food for me to take just in case. Well, we had to bring every bit of it back home at the end. I even joked to Chris that he must be on some evil plan to make me fatter than I already am. He said yes and smiled as he walked away. The Pirillo team (many of which are his family) worked very hard to make sure no one was ever hungry. I never paid for a single meal once I was there. The food was great too!

The second reason was the set up. While we sat around to listen to the lectures, we had nice comfortable seats, had an outlet for every single persons laptop, wi-fi internet connection that somehow handled all the bandwidth us geeks were sucking up, a kick off party with free drinks, a second party the next night where they rented out one of the hottest clubs in town for just us, and tons free stuff I’m not going to bother to list here. If Chris found a way to fit in hotels we wouldn’t have a reason to spend a single dime on anything!

Now for the vibe at this conference. hat an amazing bunch of people. Now I said that there were some lectures. It was a conference after all. However, the real big deal with Gnomedex was the people. It was all about the networking. Everyone there seems very serious about making sure that no one feels like the superstar and no one feel like a no one. There is no “little guy” at Gnomedex! Within minutes of my arrival I shook the hand of Chris Pirillo himself. Then I saw him working ever so hard to make sure he was always totally available to everyone the entire weekend. Robert Scoble is about as internet famous as it gets, but the second he got there (he was a little late) he was as approachable as anyone else. I did run into one person I call “The Gnomedex asshole”, but he was the only one out of hundreds (300 – 500 I hear).

Now I am going to try to go over the speakers as quickly as possible so this article doesn’t get too boring and long. Kris Krug did a great job with his photography talk. It was a great introduction for any beginners in the audience and it really made me feel good when I knew about everything he said. I must be learning pretty fast on my own if his talk didn’t teach me anything! Then there was some talk about some site called Ma.gnolia. Most in the audience seemed to not have a clue who or what they were even after the talk, but that was one of the few weak points of the weekend. This is to be expected and I didn’t care because I had internet to keep productivity going. Then we had Ben Huh, the owner of icanhascheezburger. He not only made us all laugh until our sides hurt, but also gave up some hints on what separates his companies sites from all the other low brow humor sites. He could have called his talk, “Why you fail and I don’t”, but he didn’t. Nice guy. The next highlight was from a woman named Beth Kanter. She challenges the Gnomedex crowd to help her raise enough money to send Leng Sopharath, an orphan from Cambodia, for her junior year at college. We made %1006 of the goal before she left the stage. This was the most powerful moment of the weekend and I am proud to say I was a part of it.

There was something about some art work called Serial Cyborg, but other than the name I never was sure what it had to do with tech. Interesting art sure, but not sure why it was at a tech conference. Friday lectures ended with something called Ignite Seattle. Not really sure what Ignite is about still, but they had these great 5 minutes lectures they hit us with at rapid fire. I loved how if it sucked it was over in 5 minutes, but if it was good it was really powerful. It ended with “Matt“. This is the guy who (in his own words) danced really badly all over the world. His whole speech was done in 5 minutes? Wow, pretty amazing stuff if you were there. After that we all took over a club in Seattle called The Showbox for 4 hours of networking, chatting, eating, drinking, and just being social off the web so we can have a more powerful social experience on the web in the future.

Saturday started off with more Ignite stuff, but then went into a talk with Sarah Lacy. For those that don’t know, at this years SXSW she had an interview with the head of Facebook that went very badly because she couldn’t seem to ask an actual question. Well this time she had a few questions, but her whole thing came off about as unfocused and scatterbrained as it could be. Very messy and I almost felt sorry for her. Kudos to Chris for giving her a second chance, but I think she has failed twice. She still needs to learn how to make a point! The next highlight was something called a Vocal Joystick. The guy showed a new advancement in technology that would allow someone to control their “mouse” or “joystick using only their voice. Then he showed how this could be used for speech therapy. Now if that made people go nuts it was nothing compared to the next highlight. Chris brought on Scott Maxwell, the Mars Rover Driver Team Lead for the Mars Exploration Rover project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory! I think a few of us shat ourselves. I am sure that for some, this talk alone was worth the price of the ticket.

Well, the entire last day I started doing interviews with everyone I could. I didn’t care how big or small they were. I wanted to interview everyone I could just to have some video interviews for this article. Sad thing was that I had no microphone and the sound on 95% of them was so bad they are not even worth posting to YouTube. Two of them did turn out pretty good though. So below are my interviews with Robert Scoble and Chris Pirillo. If I did an interview with you at Gnomedex please contact me so we can do it over in audio format at least. I am going to try to hunt everyone down and do this as well, but feel free to contact me as well. My most humble apologies. Next time I am renting a better camera with a microphone jack on it. Next year I am bringing a posse too. Chris hinted that he was thinking about changing to one day conferences done in a tour format instead. I hope this isn’t what happens. Three days gives us a chance to bond more and the networking done has more lasting value than it would with a one day event. So please just keep doing the great Gnomedex you have done for the past few years Chris. We all loved it! I am saving up for Gnomedex 9.0 starting yesterday!

Robert Scoble:

Chris Pirillo:

I will try to salvage some of the others, but I would rather do the interview over if people would be willing to do it over the phone. Thanks for your understanding. I’m a noob with some of this stuff.