“We want to take back our media”

It’s all about “the power of subscription.” The user, you, can now choose what you want to listen to and watch, when you want to do it. This is a completely different model from the current top down hierarchies of the music business and Hollywood where they push media at you and you are expected to consume. This is a paradigm shift.

Curry compared Gnomedex to Woodstock. An explosion of new ideas, good feelings, and huge creativity. How many in the audience were at Woodstock, he asked. Dave Winer, myself, and one other, as it turned out. Yes, it is the same feeling. When I sat in that field at Woodstock, I knew we were making history. I got the same feeling at Gnomedex. Something Big is happening.

RSS, blogs, and podcasting allow us to build entirely new networks that route around the tired old restrictive structures of mass media. We can create, promote, and distribute our own music, video, and ideas, and we don’t need wheezing media dinosaurs to do it. They know something is happening, but they don’t know what it is. Let’s seize the moment.

Listen to Curry’s podcast (mp3) of his keynote, it’s excellent.

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During his keynote, Dave Winer got the entire audience to sing “Yellow Submarine” for no apparent reason that anyone could discern but it sure was fun. Adam Curry responded to this during his keynote by playing a mashup of another Beatles song.

Photographers in front of the stage and Curry during the playing of the mashup as 300 Gnomedexers yelled, danced, and acted silly.

At the end of Gnomedex, three uber-Geeks piled on the sofa on the stage. (l. to r.) J.D. Lasica of Ourmedia.org and DarkNet. Chris Pirillo, Gnomedex organizer. Robert Scoble, Microsoft tech evangelist and blogger.
In the interest of preserving this historical moment, we present in unaltered form the Polizeros podcast of the audience singing “Yellow Submarine” with Dave, recorded in appropriately tinny audio on the internal mic of my iRiver mp3 player.

mp3 (2:15, 795k)

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My friend Jeff Jobson in Seattle with his prize early 70’s Checker Medicar, only 98 were made!

It was manufactured by Checker Cab and had special high ceilings so a person in a wheelchair could sit upright in the back seat. His t-shirt says “Still plays with cars.” Jeff, who I hadn’t seen in ten years, opines that the current myopia in the Republican Party leads him to believe they have become “Not-Sees.”

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