Tough Guy
Before Gnomedex 4 I had grown vaguely aware of Chris Pirillo. Not being a TechTV viewer (hadn’t moved to a cable system running it) I was unaware of Chris’s community, though this Iowa get-together was slowly penetrating the outer layers of the blogosphere and the tech media worlds I try and monitor. Then Gnomedex moved to Lake Tahoe and then its present home in Seattle. Now it’s Gnomedex 7, and Pirillo is blowing it all up.
“There is no theme.” Chris says from the stage as he opens this year’s conference. Not true. The theme is how to make a difference. A good question from an intuitive guy who I count on not getting, so that I can learn and wake up and get over myself and the map of the world that I project all my distortions and fears through.
The opening keynote is an old-fashioned barnburner by a self-described spy named Robert David Steele. As one who believed David Lifton when he said Kennedy’s brain was missing, I enjoyed the harrangue, a melange of Tim Leary meets Gordon Liddy as told by Olivers Stone and Hardy. He stayed mostly away from my favorite tarpits, opting instead for what he summarized as “Your government is stupid.” He wants a Cisco router that provides a rules-based approach to who sees information about himself. I question his anointing Cisco, but the idea is right. “If Cisco won’t make them, make it yourself.”
Steele thinks last year’s crew was unimpressive, inconsequential people or A-Listers on the way down (my paraphrase.) He challenges us to harvest the so-called citizen journalism revolution and cuts off conversation about common wisdom arguments about Internet radio, but undercuts his credibility with sweeping kickers like “Once one state gets it, the rest will quickly follow.” A marine’s explanation of life. Pirillo’s reboot is underway.
August 11th, 2007 at 10:14 am
Online communities are here to stay, for a while at least, and you have to give credit where due to anyone who can make a living running one. At the same time I think we have only just started down the road to Andy Warhol’s “Fifteen minutes of fame” culture.
For the Internet consumer as opposed to the all-too-many producers, the trick is to get nourishment rather than what my mother-in-law used to call “empty calories” (she was referring to my dietary habits of the time). It’s not easy. One problem is with outlets that produce SO MUCH stuff that you are forced to sample (and even sample from summary feeds rather than whole content) and then draw your own conclusions about signal to noise ratio. I’ve tried several times to “get into” various Pirillo productions and been unable to stay with it, finding it just a cut above “somethingawfull” and a cut below Scoble’s various products, which are at least not completely ad-libbed.
I recently did a purge of my most prolific feeds and find that I am still finding most of the news I’m interested in from the old stand-by sources like Slashdot, WSJ, and some MSM that only produce 5-10 stories a day rather than hundreds (with lots of repetition and dupes of course).
They don’t call it “social networking” for nothin’ and while I’ll look for anything substantial that comes from Gnomedex, I think it is more a big tech party for people who normally only “meet” online to actually rub elbows with one another (nothing wrong with that if you live in the area). Last one I remember reading about had something about a red couch, I don’t remember anything else.
One of these days it may sink in to Silicon Valley (and by extension Seattle and LA offshoots) that when it comes to technology, your social lives are quite boring to the rest of the country. For those looking for vicarious social lives, Hollywood produces more than enough to go around, and the geek variety pales by comparison.