This is just a dump of rough notes about the first day of Gnomedex and not in anyway an attempt to be complete or comprehensive. I was especially impressed by Sen. John Edwards but then you’d expect that even if I didn’t more or less agree with his political positions. People don’t get to his level of political success without being personally impressive.
Chris Pirillo’s welcome/opening
Goofy plane safety video. Had Dave Winer read out the proclamation from the governor of Washington declaring today and tomorrow RSS Days.
Muddled message but says there will be new media sites based around the network effect but not many of them. Some needling back and forth with Scott Rafer ex of Friendster.
Former member of rock group The Presidents of the United States of America, now runs a PR agency for non-corporate entertainment organizations. Opened with a couple of Velvet Underground songs including Waiting for the Man, then lists a bunch of ways recording musicians can make money.
His band’s first record sold 5M copies, then they got the rights back from Sony and make more money from iTunes than anywhere else.
Brings people out of the audience to describe their companies business model. First is Ted Reingold, monetizing passionate communities by bringing advertisers into the conversation and selling subscriptions on Dogster.com and Catster.com. Next is Shannon Clark.
A woman from IODA PromoNet, independent online distribution alliance, group of independent record labels that provide licenses for bloggers/podcasters to use their music legitimately. Only need to include a BUY link. Over 12,000 songs from 2500 label and more every day.
Brian Dear’s (now Yahoo! property) eventful.com has a subsite that allows fans to ‘demand’ local performances from their favorite bands, writers and other performers which is gaining community as well as attention from performers.
Marc Cantor rips on Apple, saying they control ~80% of the paid download market and exploit it unmercifully, and suggests that it will be very difficult to wrest this control away.
Someone from Warner Brothers Records, claims to be not evil, says the notion of what it means to be a major label these days is changing. Think of it as a collection of 120 businesses, some are successful Madonna, some have a built-in success like Paris Hilton, but the point is find the next successful business. Using the internet is making the business two way.
Other people seem to have okay wireless access but for me its barely working even with graphics turned off.
John Edwards
Considers the interactive nature of the web to be a meaningful change for American politics. Strong supporter of net neutrality. Allows more people to be involved in a more substantive way, where politicians can no longer just speak at the people/voters.
Marc Cantor, third gen red diaper baby, asks when Democrats will grow “some balls” and take the Republicans to the mat. Edwards: If Democrats what to lead this country we need to stop the mealey mouth weasal words, such as on Universal Health Care.
Q: Can you hear it in your own voice when you slip into slick politcal speak? A: We’re so trained and so conditioned for so long that it isn’t easy to stop doing. Some politicians just won’t get out of this, their comfort zone. I can hear it, on a personal level I try not to do it but its hard in an environment where reporters are asking questions and fast responses are required.
Q: How does politics deal with geographical dispersed ‘local’ interest groups? A: We created One Corps, an online community with members all over the country, to help support local Democratic candidates and bring their issues to local polity.
Got into his perspective about what really drives national, presidential elections. Mostly about the person and personality, not language or issues. Battle for control of democratic party between centrists and those who want to drive big issues (which includes Edwards).
Someone suggested to put a video blogger on the campaign bus to expose much more of the reality of politics, which Edwards seemed to think is good.
What about paper trails for voting machines? Also good.
Werner Vogels, Amazon
Opening section is a presentation on net neutrality (find details/slides) and the recent political history. There is no network neutrality now and if the telcos/cablecos get their way there never will be. People who want a content-neutral internet need to understand the politics and oppose the lobbying power.
Today’s Cringely is on topic. Wikipedia has a good entry with rich linkage.
I asked him if this issue wouldn’t have the same legal problem as the CLEC/Telco battle of the ’90s, that SCOTUS said it was unconstitutional, but neither Werner nor anyone in the audience had a response.
7 person group within Edelman called Me 2 Revolution, mission is to help clients become more conversational, rather than the old way of controlling the conversion.
Boris Mann suggested that permalinks, personality and passion are important to authentic web marketing.
Marc Cantor discussion
All about open standards. but what do vendors do to differentiate and therefore have a value to build a business on?
Susan Mernitt
Her blog post about this presentation. Product manager for Yahoo! Personals. Sex and relationships. Every blogger she knows has a secret blogroll of sex, relationships, rants and other nominally private activities. Finds blogs on which individuals post regularly about difficult personal situations and their life journies special and compelling.
Discussion gets into what happens when people’s real life collides with anything nasty, sexual or demeaning they posted or was posted about them on the web. Some think soon enough it won’t matter because of a maturing society or that everything is always potentially being recorded and available on the web.
BillSaysThis 