O'Reilly Network Weblogs: Moments from GnomeDex

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http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/3563

Moments from GnomeDex

by Tim O'Reilly
Jul. 25, 2003

I've long admired Chris Pirillo's infectious enthusiasm and sense of fun. His conference opened with an short intro by Chris -- "I'm not much of a speaker. I'm a talker." He wants to meet and greet each and every one of the attendees -- and I saw him working the crowd during registration, doing just that. I wanted to come speak at his conference because of the way he throws himself into everything he does. Because he's young and has nothing to lose, he's willing to try anything, say anything, and see what happens. As a result, I figure that he'll come up with some great new ideas somewhere along the way.

He's created a conference where the speakers too have a blogger-ish informality and conversational quality. The result is something with a bit of the energy of a revival meeting. The tone of the conference was captured well by speaker Eric Sink when he said, "I don't think of this as a conference but as a support group." He went on to say that being a geek in the mid-west can make you feel a bit like an outsider.

But though they might feel like outsiders in Iowa, these folks are technically sharp. I was blown away by the technical sophistication of the Q&A after Nelson Minar's talk about Google.

I'm glad I'm here. Good to find that geek culture is alive and well in America's heartland.

P.S. The moment I originally meant to blog. Eric Unagst of Microsoft showed three recent spams received by Bill Gates. 1. Earn your college degree. (Remember that Gates dropped out of Harvard.) 2. Get out of debt! 3. Do you need legal help? A good laugh by all. Like so many Microsoft speakers, Eric shows Microsoft at its best -- smart, funny, passionate, with the ability to poke fun at how the rest of the industry feels about them. He gave a great talk explaining Microsoft's vision of where *personal* computing is going to go, with initiatives like xbox, and various things that they want to put into smart home computing. To paraphrase Kenneth Patchen, it's the first time that I really appreciated "what the story tells itself when no one else is listening" behind some of the various Microsoft initiatives.

Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. In addition to Foo Camps ("Friends of O'Reilly" Camps, which gave rise to the "un-conference" movement), O'Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics, including the Web 2.0 Summit, the Web 2.0 Expo, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, the Gov 2.0 Summit, and the Gov 2.0 Expo. Tim's blog, the O'Reilly Radar, "watches the alpha geeks" to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim's long-term vision for his company is to change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. In addition to O'Reilly Media, Tim is a founder of Safari Books Online, a pioneering subscription service for accessing books online, and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, an early-stage venture firm.