I didn’t write about the last two sessions (the UW panel or the clean energy speaker) – partly fatigue, partly I’m tired of blogging about disappointing things. But since it’s Gnomedex attendees that started me blogging for real, might as well write a summary.

The rumor is true – Gnomedex is about the hallway conversations and the relationships, not the sessions. Some of the sessions were motivating (Ignite Seattle, Guy Kawasaki, Darren Barefoot) or sparked interesting conversations (Vanessa Fox), but those turned out to be the exception. As Ethan Kaplan put it, “I thought it was a tech conference, not conspiracy theories and violation of thermodynamics conference.”

Far better were the people I met (Vanessa Fox, Ethan Kaplan, Dave McClure, Todd Sawicki, Deepak Singh, Gregg Spiridellis, Baratunde Thurston, etc.), reconnected with (Dave Schappell, Daryn Nakhuda - discussed my “Seattle CTO Support Group” idea with him, now actually need to follow up), know and was able to watch shine (Elan Lee, Leo Dirac), etc. Noting the obvious – if you weren’t blogging, you were twittering; if you weren’t twittering, you were facebooking; lots of casual mentions of Facebook and zer0 of LinkedIn. Oh, and a celebrity sighting at a very good sushi dinner.

The single message I’m thinking most about was Deborah Schultz’s comments about the way your relationships and networks weave together, and how that impacts my own networks. Oh, and stick with Jason’s comment - try to interact with actual people more than I manage their online proxies.

Huge thanks to Chris (who I talked to for one minute before someone interrupted, ah well, next time) and Ponzi for making this unique event happen!

That Robert Scoble can’t interrupt it to curse about Valleywag. Ethan Kaplan and I turned to each other at the same time and said in unison “Did that really just happen?”

I wasn’t going to write about the discussion with Derek Miller about blogging and living through cancer – I don’t know Derek and didn’t feel like it needed a book report – but interrupting the end with this felt obscene.

to getting Winered yesterday. My take – the yelling made Gnomedex into inside baseball – there’s no value to one luminary yelling at another luminary, especially at the first second when Jason mentioned Mahalo. Yes, Jason was good at turning every question or comment into a chance to sell Mahalo, and yes, I would have rather seen more of a focus on the various approaches to Internet pollution, but mostly I was just disappointed with the childish behavior. The rest of us don’t need to be protected, thanks.

Overall one of the highlights of the event – an interesting and engaging talk that used JibJab as an example in telling a story, and gave people lessons on what to do next for themselves.

Gregg’s the CEO of JibJab. He started with how the company began – his path was supposed to be investment banking, but the Internet (and his artistic brother) called. They began pre-bust, took only family & friends funding, and survived the bust by going from 13 to 2 people. During six years their model changed every three months, including selling Nasty Santa dolls at Spencer Gifts – they knew that they could build a brand and provide great content and just had to keep finding ways to stay alive.

They learned from a Bush-Gore rap battle in 2000 that they could develop something in July, and if it’s good it could last through November, unlike the short shelf life of so many other videos.

This Land came out in 2004, went to their 130K subscribers they had built over six years, and went from 100K views on Day 1 (normal would be 40K) to 1.5MM by Day 7. NASA sent a copy to the space station, a copy went to Antarctica. Marketing math: 80MM views, 590MM “offline brand impressions.” Meanwhile they’re answering 30,000 mails/week with just them and their wives; the day before the Today Show, they created a Yahoo store with a fake DVD picture, sold 9,000 and then figured out how to manufacture it.

Real business model through 2005 was licensing fees – couldn’t afford to build an ad sales team. Cobbling together revenue streams however they could. Funded about a year ago to grow to the next opportunity…

JibJab is a hit-driven business, and even good CPMs on a hit-driven business can’t build a long-term revenue model, especially with high production costs. (A normal hit for them is 3.7MM views, which at a $20CPM is $74K – hardly pays for production even when it’s a hit.) So how do you create a scalable programming model that’s viable to the tail?

They started breaking down what they did in a “relevance spectrum” (which does sound just a wee bit corporate…). To get long shelf life content, you need content relevant to different people at different times – which is all about social expression/lifecycle events and holidays – birthdays, anniversaries, etc. Realized that American Greetings online is an $85MM business, smileys for IAC (FunWebProducts) is a $100MM business (Zango has a similar story) and pays for IAC investments, etc. HotOrNot & Facebook have gifting businesses, etc. This turns out to be a huge business, and “Social Expression Programming” is an opportunity.

Gregg demo’d Starring You, their new mass-market, compete-with-American-Greetings product, making it easy to make something good – users are good at distribution, not creation. You upload a head shot and can create a quick movie – Hula, Disco, etc. – with them. He had pictures of Chris Priillo and Robert Scoble and the video generated huge laughs and applause – we’re the mass market too, evidently! He asked if we wanted to see another movie and everyone was excited to see another. Can create more of these videos over time. I can absolutely see my family, especially my father, playing with this for hours – will send it to him today.

They’ve designed the content so that it’s embeddable (including the publishing tools) and uncompilable, so every drop point can be a viral hub, but their branding stays in place – critical for their long-term value chain.

Baratunde asks about melanin enhancement for black etc. users – Gregg says that they deliberately designed the dances to be silly enough that it wouldn’t matter, but did note that 2% of their audience was African-American and they had to make a tradeoff. (He also noted that people have done things like dog and Darth Vader heads, and I sort of wanted Baratunde to go postal on the comparison – mostly just for fun – but no luck.)

Some notes:
It does feel disappointing that companies that do have the ability to create high-quality mass-market content can’t make a long-term business out of it online, and while these are great toys, how do you do this and the next “This Land”? How do you make sure that all great media doesn’t have to be simple and single-user consumable? Gregg notes in response to a question that there was a 1-1 tradeoff – it’s opportunity cost, This Life took eight weeks, they can now do it in four. They will still do some of this for brand-building, and they can do narrative (movie trailers) this way, not just dance.

I admit to already having a love for Ignite Seattle – I spoke at the first one, it’s the singular event for bringing techies together in Seattle, and every time the tone of the talks and the event shifts slightly. Bre & Brady brought something amazing to Seattle.

I was very excited to see that seven speakers from this week’s Ignite were added to the Gnomedex schedule – even happier that five were local and that I know a few of them well.

I didn’t know before attending Gnomedex that we were going to need some fast-talking, type-A energy on Saturday morning, but after Michael Linton, we really needed it, and scotto – who turns out to be a dynamic and engaging speaker, and who used the 15-second slide shift like a master, in a talk that was either memorized (a good thing!) or seemed so, was an energetic kickoff.

Dave McClure struggled a bit more with the format and there was too much data to get the ONE BIG IDEA that Ignite talks do so well, but he’s fun to listen to.

Deborah talked about online relationships, gave an example of getting contacted by business partners through Flickr – are your friends on Flickr/Facebook real? – and says that these relationships are real because we live, in a relationship economy, “transactions are the by-products of healthy relationships” – “[relationships] come to your aid when you least expect them” – you never know which contact will matter, weave yourself and your networks across multiple groups – be someone who relates and brings things together. Nice! I’ve been thinking about this as I get started on Facebook – who are the people from my network that I bring in and what does it mean to have so many different people from different parts of life?

Beth Goza’s encouraging us to think about the mobile web as being different than just what you did on the Internet, same metrics and porting. She’s doing a clever job of segueing from point to point. Much of this talk is basic for people who know their way around mobile development (carrier lockdowns, etc.) and there isn’t much of a conclusion but it’s still fun to listen to her.

Leo! Leo! Leo’s up, going from his talk about the transhuman revolution in Ignite 3 to Venture Term Sheets in Ignite 4. Always fun to know people whose interests are so varied. This talk is giving the 5-minute intro to what VC’s are, what they invest in, how they work, etc. His slides on liquidation preference are the clearest way I’ve seen this concept presented publicly. A perfect use of five minutes to explain the concepts.

Brian Dorsey (who I know from somewhere…) came to talk about Noonhat. Starts with the premise that our interests and our social networks keep us connecting to the same sort of people, and how he wanted to use lunch to meet new kinds of people. The site is a clever way of finding and connecting, and Brian talked about how he built it in his time (50 hours of development plus N hours of chatting) and no other costs. (Random note: Brian provides a simple progress bar on the below of his slides to show how far he is. When you know these presentations are exactly five minutes, you get more interested in following time.)

Last talk is Elan Lee, a luminary in the gaming world and a friend of mine. (Sorry I called you a luminary, Elan. You’re going to be mobbed after this talk.) “Mundane objects all around us provide entertainment and you have to just go find it.” The audience is mesmerized as he gives fun examples from life (carry a bucket and you can get in anywhere, throw toast at unexpected parties, customer service lines with random questions – ask the Kremlin or Butterball if there’s a God), then from his work (e.g. the radio drama of ILoveBees). Elan has an even cooler progress bar on the bottom, though it’s a bit stressful to watch and times the 15-seconds rather than the 5-minute.

In my mind (and I’m biased), this was the highlight of the Gnomedex presentations so far. Including Ignite was a great idea and I expect there will be a push for more talks like this going forward.)

Once Chris posts the videos, I’ll point to them here.

Michael Linton’s talking about community currencies – tribes (regional, social, etc.) building their own currencies and trading them along with the standard federal currencies. He’s helped lead a very long and cumbersome software system for managing these currencies.

This is a fascinating topic and Michael seems to be an expert in it, but it’s not a fascinating presentation – it’s just weaving (or, uncharitably, rambling) around, the why took a long time to explain, and unfortunately his speaking style and crowded powerpoint (his first time using PPT) doesn’t work well in long-length presentation format. Some people are engaged but there’s a significant amount of browsing/blogging/twittering about.

I’m sure they’re nice people, but Gnomedex should not be your public speaking debut.

From the speakers:

• “We love each other, we love martinis.”
• “We came up with the name geekbrief.tv and it was like creativity diarrhea.”
• “there’s something she does on video that’s just magic.”
• “I like to hide in the closet.”
• “We’ve always used Splenda and we love Splenda.”

From the IRC chat:

dotBen: If this is what their podcast is like, I’m off to subscribe to razar blades on iTunes
sugarattack: someone bring back Jason Calacanis.
ethankap: “hi judy, drugs are bad!”

dotBen: They have a CHRISTIAN BACKGROUND??!?! Yeah, it’s just like Dawn and Drew
faddah: it’s so nice that she let her potential stalker from church become her husband.

scottru: is anybody thinking that we’re going to be called to the stage for testimonials soon?
srhaber: this must be what a scientology seminar is like

ethankap: her twitter “I’m perky today!”
ethankap: his twitter “She is moving to another room, must follow”
dotBen: “Can you tell me more about your private videos plz”

scottru: oh now we have an ad for Splenda. That’s great.
scottru: you know what I like? Splenda.
dotBen: how do you link from a technical talk about the iPhone through to a tasty recipe with splenda?
davd: why not just dress up like NASCAR?
dotBen: I can see it now: Adam Curry, Ron Bloom and the execs at Splenda smoking cigars in a boardroom doing a big-bucks deal.
davd: doing lines of SPLENDA

dotBen: I’m looking for a video network that really does do ‘everything’. Not just get the advertising and the hosting, I also want them to do the show too. I don’t want to do anything, basically. Let me know.

Jason began with an homily to the early Internet when everyone was good and there was no trolling or spam. That time didn’t exist, but fine – it’s certainly true that there’s no good way any longer to run an email newsletter business.

Next there’s the cycle of technology: cool stuff gets interrupted by marketers, and the technology moves away from the pollution or dies. E-mail died, choked with spam. Now SEO is in the same boat – search gets destroyed by overaggressive marketers. We’ve started to route around it in search just as we do in e-mail spam. But blogs haven’t lost just yet, though everybody talks about deleting spam from their comments. user-generated video is also surviving – consumers aren’t being overrun by marketing videos. Payola is taking over Digg & Netscape, content’s being stolen and republished.

Jason segues (without comment) to Mahalo, his product, using human beings to organize the search results around key searches. Talked about the early objections around whether they could scale to beyond 9,000 hand-crafted results – started a greenhouse for people to do this. People can submit links for an editor to see and editor will accept/reject and why.

Can’t get people to switch from Google, so they’ve created Mahalo Follow, an extension that will compare their results to Google/Yahoo (as well as content-rich sites), to allow you to compare human results with Google results.

Unfortunately nobody was unable to move this back to the original topic (and the interesting issues w/r/t stopping marketing pollution in other realms), and so Jason was able to continue to do product analysis and pitching.

Lots of this ends up being inside baseball, and other folks will blog on that because they like doing so. Eh.

Vanessa provided an opener about what it means to lose control over your identity – in her role at Google running Webmaster Central, she ended up taking a very public profile in SEO and site design, and people used her identity for humor (Yahoo blog posts linking her romantically to other SEO folks, someone else linkbaiting “Vanessa Fox Nude”). At that point it really became a conversation – other people who’ve lost control over their identities and what they’ve done about it – take it over, wait for it to die out, etc. We then talked about secondary actors (infant children, future spouses) and then had a long conversation about whether it’s ok to make available photos & videos of your children.

Started to work w/CBS and other places looking at the Internet – realized that all of the writing online anywhere about elder folks was about disease and death, figured she wasn’t ready to die yet so she ended up becoming a blogger advocating for technology and services for the elderly.

She did an experiment to try to help the techies understand what it’s like to be elderly Internet user – a few attendees donned garden gloves and thick eyeglasses and tried to type in a URL and read smaller, white-on-black and red-on-black type. A visible experiment of something we could have guessed but still might not think about.

The 55+ segment is the fastest-growing segment online, though it’s still comparatively small: there aren’t enough medical professionals in this space and there’s no plan to catch up, but we could build technology to help with monitoring – but only if elders can use the web.

65+ never used computers at work – sometimes family helps but she’s amazed by how many have learned how to use computers themselves. She hears about them when they email and ask for help starting a weblog – two months later they’re asking about CSS. In all cases, the physical interaction is always the problem. Why can’t there be an elder computer like the $100 OLPC?

Many of the questions were of the form “would help elders?” everything from iPhone-touch screens (which she’d never seen and asked “have you all seen one?”, prompting a lot of laughter) to the Presto (the printer that accepts emails). We then had a several-minute iPhone demo on stage, which went from “this is great” to “this is hard and I can’t stand it” in about 90 seconds.