At Gnomedex

I’m at Gnomedex, the annual geek love fest up in Seattle. This was my favorite conference last year, and they’re off to a good start on day one. Saturday they’ll continue a live stream of the proceedings.

More and more familiar faces at these gatherings. Like: Buzz Bruggeman, Susan Mernit, Dave Winer, Halley Suitt, John Hartman, Eric Rice, Josh Bancroft, Derrick Oien, Doug Kaye, Brian Dear, Arieana Foley, Bre Pettis, Dave McClure, Mitch Ratcliffe, Steve Gillmor, Kathy Gill, Steve Rubel, Scott Rubel, Bob Wyman, Corey Denis, Boris Mann, Dan Farber, Kaliya Hamlin, Scott Mace and plenty of others.

The highlight of day one was former Sen. John Edwards’ appearance. (Seattle P-I photo above. I’ll post photos on Sunday; it’s still too many steps to post my Digital Rebel XT’s shots to Flickr.) I was an early supporter of Sen. Edwards’ candidacy for president — and I still think he was the best candidate running in ’04. Edwards didn’t give a keynote, but fielded questions and led a discussion on mostly tech-related questions, with the occasional political question thrown in.

I had a chance to praise him for his work with the OneAmerica Committee fighting poverty and putting it back on the national agenda. I asked what we in the tech community — and the 320 smart people in this room — could do to help spur public awareness and action to fight poverty, and how we could continue the conversation after today. Edwards said he would instruct his staff to open up a channel for that dialogue to take place.

We haven’t heard anything so far, so I hope we can follow up. There were a lot of good ideas floating around the room after he left. I also had a chance to shake his hand and give him a copy of “Darknet” to get him up to speed on some of the issues facing society as we all become technology and media creators instead of passive consumers.

I’ll be posting video interviews of Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble within the next week.

Other highlights

• Check out bLaugh, a new “blog humor site,” featuring occasional caricatures of bloggers. The initial one — of Steve Rubel (Rubel without a cause) — is priceless.

Chris and Ponzi’s rules for Gnomedex include: “Blog, cast, snap, stream – it’s yours. Feel free to blog, record, remix without permission. No weird licensing schemes. … Assume your picture will be taken. … Assume what you say will be blogged.”

Good quotes:

• Kathy Gill: “Micromarkets is where it is. The mass market is dead.”

• More Kathy Gill: “Geeks shouldn’t name things.”

• Michael Arrington: “Jigsaw is one of the most evil venture backed companies on the Internet.”

• Michael Arrington on the revamped Netscape: “It’s a frickin’ Digg clone now, it’s pathetic.”

• Marc Canter: “It’s not about big or small, it’s about open or closed.”

• More Marc Canter, in arguing for open APIs: “If you can suck, you can spit.”

Later: Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s coverage.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.