You could just walk into a conversation and you knew what they were talking about. Lots of video bloggers, podcasters, techies; some from startups, others from Microsoft or Feedburner or a CGI company or whatever. Most have multiple interests and/or blogs. A smart, creative crowd.
I was happily surprised by the positive reaction to Polizeros, which I described as an antiwar blog. Several already read it, others really liked the idea. As far as I know, Polizeros is the only political blog there.
This opening reception was last night. Gnomedex starts today for two days of solid non-stop talks and panels about the future of blogs and podcasting. Panels include “Tomorrow’s Syndication” , “Today’s Citizen Media”, “Tomorrow’s Open Source”, with keynote speeches by Dave Winer (who invented blogs and RSS) and Dean Hachamovitch of Microsoft who is expected to make a major announcement about Microsoft, RSS, blogs, and podcasting.
Blogs allow everyone to have a voice. We fly under, through, and past the radar of major media. Someone in a position to know told me he mentioned Daily Kos, the biggest of all the political blogs, to someone at a large newspaper and got swearing in return. It wasn’t even about Kos’s progressive politics. It was about this little upstart of a blog that now gets more hits (450,000 a day) than the newspaper’s website gets. That is the power of blogs.
PS On the bus shuttle from the airport the driver said Boeing was the largest employer in Seattle, 48,000 employess, with Microsoft at 16,000, yet their payrolls are the same, so “either someone is overpaid or someone is underpaid