I'm here at Gnomedex in Seattle. It's been a couple of years since I've attended, for a variety of reasons, but I love the participants and have made many great connections here over the years. I made the decision last minute and picked up an extra ticket from the Hop Studios. The experience - as always - has been great: thanks to @chrispirillo and the rest of the Gnomedex team.

I want to talk a bit something I've been thinking about for a while, which is "first timers". The thinking behind growing BarCamp Vancouver to ~300 participants last year was simple math. If we have about 50% new people every year, that means only 75 new people experiencing the unconference format and BarCamp experience. Growing it to 300, meant we double the "new experiences" we can enable every year.

Ethan Kaplan is doing an awesome session at Gnomedex. Here are some awesome quotes: Pop is a machine Monetizing beyond the physical 5 inch And of course, go off and check out the Drupal-powered Headautomatica that Ethan put together. It's using the hall of fame module to have people vote on aggregated items from everywhere.Photo by noded on Flickr 

I've now got ShoZu on my Nokia 6630 setup to easily send video to my blip.tv account*. Lots of Gnomedex video going up.

Most fun was lamenting about the lack of Nokia smartphones to buy here in North America with Bre Pettis (someone *needs* to give Bre a phone for his Phonetagger alter-ego) and Will Pate. Short story here is: Nokia, forget about buzz marketing to give away phones -- there are people that just want to *buy* your high end phones.

Watch the Video

And I'm going to repeat what I said to Nokia before about encouraging carriers (especially in Canada):

My top hint on what Nokia should do? Forget the free phones: continue to sell great phones, but pressure Fido and Rogers to offer a "citizen journalism" data package so people in Canada can use all the cool features. The HipTop plan from Fido is $25/month for unlimited data...I think there would be a ton of people that would pay that to be able to upload pictures to Flickr on the fly and use all of the other great features that Nokia phones can enable (*cough* ShoZu *cough*).

I made some comments today during Steve Rubel's Gnomedex session. Steve asked, what are PR and marketing professionals doing right and wrong? What do people who blog want/need from such departments?

After much arm waving I got Steve to notice me, and I answered with three P's.

1. Permalinks: folks, this is such a simple one. Don't make your press release page be "press.php" and old news be "archive.php". Have a single, unique link for each press release, news story, product, or (*gasp*) blog post you make. This means not trying to make me figure out a crazy javascript or Flash navigation system, but simply having a clear, single link I can use to directly get to information. URL schemes like /news/2006/07/01/bigstory or /products/coolproduct/model-vw83 are some good examples.
2. Product Info: I like product info. I like permalinks to direct product info. I like tech specs, and I like easily grab-able (and even better, friendly licensed) product photos. Heck, encourage me to hotlink images from your corporate server. Include copy/paste code that includes the permalink and a caption that I can drop into any system that groks HTML. For bonus points, make a little Flash/Javascript/rotating GIF widget that I can put into a post.
3. Personality: yes, I want personality. This one is last, because a lot of corporates just can't get past legal, or want the community to bring in the personality. If you're not going to blog, perhaps upgrade your press release writer to someone with a little more human in their blood, or give me a contact that I can talk to/interview to get more of a human face to the information you're presenting.

It seems so simple. But I know how difficult this can be. Many marketing and PR departments rely on a chain of consultants, contractors, or other folks to manage their web presence somewhere down the line. PR types need to become actively vocal about the needs they have. The three P's might be a good place to start.

I'm sitting at the opening remarks of Gnomedex in Seattle.

Just wrapped two fantastic days at DrupalCamp Seattle. As always, I thoroughly enjoyed my time hanging with Drupaleers from all over. I was amazed at how far people traveled: we had participants from Calgary, Minnesota, San Francisco, and probably more places that I'm not aware of. This Drupal thing might just take off!

Actually, I think that's the amazing thing: people are picking up Drupal for all sorts of projects. As much hype as Ruby on Rails gets, it is so enjoyable to meet people that are learning the Drupal interface and doing very cool things without being programmers or developers. 

And of course, Chris Pirillo just let us know that TechMeme was hacked.

Looks like Mesh Conference was just announced -- a "Web 2.0" conference for Canada. At $350 for 2 days, I have to think about this vs. Gnomedex. Of course, those are Canadian pesos, so lots less. Many interesting faces, but not a lot of details on tracks, conference style, etc. The blurb from one of the first blog posts goes like this:

There is all this buzz around Web 2.0. But what’s really happening, especially around here? Does anybody know? Can anybody help me understand it, and what it means for me? My business? My future? My family? My world?mesh’s mandate will be to answer this question in as compelling, credible and authentic a way possible. Everything to do with the event will be around furthering that objective, and the content itself will serve to help mesh participants (not attendees :-)) to really start to get it, this year and in years to come. We will create the Canadian forum for next generation Web ideas and leaders.

Gnomedex 2005 has wrapped, and Roland and I are driving north heading back to Vancouver, discussing our experiences at the conference. My Bryght blog has all the things I posted during the conference. I posted a lot more than I thought I would, even with shaky WiFi connectivity, lots of intense sessions and hallway meetings.

I thought I would come back over here and pass on a couple of rumours:

• Google is readying people search capabilities. Typing in a person's name in proper caps and clicking on "I'm feeling lucky" makes...interesting things happen. Think about it!
• Adam Curry was overwhelmed by the Vancouver presence at Gnomedex. He's moving from Amsterdam to Vansterdam.

Not a rumour: no bears or fish were harmed at the Edgewater Hotel.