Gnomedex 9.0 Opening Night and Morning Session

• Aug 21st, 2009
• Posted by Ron
• Posted in Seattle Events, Social Media, Social Media Events, Social Media News, Social Media Technology, Spring Creek Group

Most parties consist of all the attendees bunched around the punch bowl, jostling for a drink – but Gnomedex’s opening party isn’t most parties. While the drink tickets were flying around like ticker tape at another city’s championship parade (seriously, Seattle – are we allergic to championship rings?), the real action was on the other side of the event hall where attendees were busy looking at tables.

Granted, calling the Microsoft Surface a table is like calling an F-16′s ejection seat a chair, but the fact that these interactive pieces of furniture were the center of attention was pretty interesting.  Even Robert Scoble took some time to play around with the event function that allowed users to put their conference card down on the Surface and trade contact info, store media and interact with other eventgoers.

Chris Brogan set up shop in the back of the room to sell copies of his new book “Trust Agents,” which hasn’t even hit shelves yet.

The most astounding thing wasn’t the fact that these “stars” of social media were in the same room, but the fact that they were just normal people. Yes, Scoble might have a bazillion followers and can make or break a company with a flick of the mousewheel, but you wouldn’t have known it.

At the morning session, Chris Brogan asked the audience members who were attending Gnomedex for the first time to raise their hands and about half the room had their hands up.  That, in itself, shows the shift in thinking for communications professionals and industry minds – this isn’t a fad.

We’ll be tweeting, blogging and TwitPic-ing our way through the rest of the conference, so stay tuned and get any questions you want us to ask anyone here at the conference to us via e-mail, blog comment, or Twitter.

Here we go. . .