On Friday, I headed down to the waterfront here in Seattle to attend Gnomedex 5.0. 

The intersection of communication and technology is creating an explosion of cool new things for people to play with, and most of the conversations at Gnomedex are covering the things that we’re the most excited about: using technology to speak to the people you want to speak to, and to listen to the people you want to listen to.

There was once a time when the only people who blogged were high-end power-geeks and teenage mallrats.  The world is tipping now.  When Dean from the IE team got up to talk, he announced for us that there are now over 15 million Spaces out there, and growing.

But with the rapid movement of people getting on the web to share a little about themselves, the “listening” side continues to be fairly rudimentary.  Some people have a hard time finding interesting sites that would be relevant to them, while others are connected to too much content, and it’s difficult to bubble up the interesting stuff, above all the noise.

At Gnomedex, it was great to see so many people understanding these basic problems.  Over the next year, we will be seeing a lot of progress in this area.  Exciting stuff.

My favorite moments of the conference:

• Seeing Chris Pirillo’s dad help out with the microphone.  I’m not sure if it was planned out this way or not, but Chris sure did put his dad to work.  Dave Winer complained that there weren’t enough microphones out in the crowd, so he could have an open discussion with the audience.  Within 30 seconds, Chris’s dad was walking up and down the aisles with a microphone.  He ended up keeping that job for the rest of the conference.
• Dean’s quips to some of the less enthusiastic attendees, during the Longhorn RSS announcement.  We work for Microsoft, and there are a certain set of people in our industry that will never trust anything we do.  It’s disappointing, but it’s something you learn to deal with.  Dean did a fairly good job of being humble for most of his talk, so his important message wasn’t lost to the people who wanted to actively engage in the conversation.  But, Dean lost it a couple times when he got pinged by a few hostile people.  At one point, Dean said something along the lines of “How about we follow up later, and you can tell me where I can get a haircut like that”.   I’m sure people could debate whether that was appropriate or not, but few would disagree that it was hilarious.
• Dare getting put on the spot and being asked to go on stage and defend some of the features he has chosen to support.  When he got beckoned on stage, he had a “Oh No.  Don’t make me do this” look on his face.  He defended himself well!
• Philip Torrone’s (http://www.flashenabled.com/) demonstrations of all the things you can do to an iPod that voids your warranty.
• Getting the OPML list of all the blogs of the attendees, and discovering a ton of new feeds to read.  My new favorite blog: The Year of the Coffee Blog.