Day Two of Gnomedex08 kicked off with an entertaining round of five-minute “Ignite” presentations, this time by members of Ignite Portland.

I actually had not heard of Ignite before I came to Gnomedex08, so it was fun to learn about it by experiencing it first-hand. For me, Ignite is like a five-minute tech version of Toastmasters. Ignite members address the question:

“If you had five minutes to say something - what would you say?”

There were several funny topics that were covered. I learned: “How to buy a car for less than $1000″, “How to boil water” (with a nuclear reactor, omg!), “How to run a start-up without losing your mind”, “Why Deutschland loves David Hasselhoff”, and the history of “Cup of Noodle”. The diverse range of topics were light-hearted and fun, which made starting off with Ignite a great way to ease into the early Saturday morning sessions.  : )

Lesson 1: Engage your Audience.

Following Ignite, Sarah Lacy, author of “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good“, came on stage to talk about “the growing angst in the blogosphere“. I had read Sarah’s book, so I was especially looking forward to this session.

The provocative title of Sarah’s talk intrigued me: “what is the angst about” and “why is there angst in the first place”? Hmm, curious.

Sarah started out with an announcement: she was going to walk around the audience and ask questions.  Sarah invited us to participate in the conversation. I thought this was a brilliant idea: two-way conversations are always more engaging and interesting.

To introduce the topic and give some context, Sarah shared what she perceived as a general consensus: public relations teams are “[obsessed with size and page views]“, and “a lot of people are writing about the same stories” and therefore have “nothing new to say”.

As blogs get bigger and bigger, Sarah asked:

1) What happened to community? 2) Can one develop a viable business as a blogger? and 3) Does community scale?

These seemed like fair enough questions to me - I was intrigued.

Lesson 2: Always Bring your Laptop to Tech Conferences. Always. Always. Always!

Something happened that surprised me quite a bit, however.  As the conversation unfolded, it turned out that many in the audience had taken part in a conversation similar to this before.  Or, so it seemed, judging from the candid comments circulating through the Twitter stream.

Yes - through Twitter.  This was a new experience for me - finding out what people in the audience were really thinking - in real time - by watching the stream of notes they were sharing on the microblog app called Twitter.  And, I didn’t have my laptop on me to follow Twitter. Doh! I was missing 50% of the conversation … !

I’ve been to tech conferences before - having a laptop always seemed optional. So, I decided at the last-minute to leave my laptop at home.  Big Gnomedex first-timer mistake.

Thankfully, I did have my Blackberry Pearl with mobile web on hand, and I used it as much as possible to follow the Twitter conversations.  My fingers got a good work-out that morning, switching from mobile web to text to mobile web as fast as they could.

Lesson 3:  Controversy makes you think.  Controversy is awesome.

On Twitter, people were calling the conversation a “real-life echo chamber”.  It became quite a controversial discussion.  Personally, I appreciated this conversation - and I thank Sarah for her courage to lead it.

The healthy exchange of opinions and comments exposed me to issues taking place in the blogosphere that I had not been aware of.  Namely: that many seem to blog about the same popular topics just so that they can drive traffic to their site (or try to).

I was impressed with Sarah’s ability to stay poised throughout this talk.

Some of the best discussions are the controversial ones: they make you think about your biases, your beliefs, and the reasons you do something.  Controversy requires you to think.  It helps to stretch your brain.  Awesome.

Lesson 3 - 7: Get out and Talk with People. Focus on Ideas and Influence. Talk about Something New. Connect through “Comments”. Write About What You Love.

Being exposed to some of the issues in the blogosphere, I also learned some great tips.  A big “thank you” to everyone who shared their thoughts during this conversation. Here are some highlights:

1. How to Find the Best Stories: “Go out and - talk - with people.” - Sarah Lacy
2. Best Reason to Blog: “Blog to drive influence.” (not direct revenue) - Charlene Li
3. Talk about Something New: “Focusing on traffic is not journalism.  Find the other areas of technology.” - Sarah Lacy
4. Best Way to Measure Blog Success: “You can’t measure Love.” (blog because you enjoy what you are writing about) - Beth Kanter
5. How to Connect: “Comment on other’s blogs, since blogs are about connecting.” - Sarah

What do you think? Why do you blog? How do you measure a “successful blog”?

If we could ask Mexican artist Frida Kahlo for some tips, what would she would say?

Lesson 8: Protect your Laptop

Following a short break, we reconvened to learn about a totally different topic: how to protect our laptops from being lost or stolen.  Gabriel Maganis and Tadayoshi Kohno, researchers from the University of Washington introduced us to: Adeona.

Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there’s no need to rely on a single third party.

Imagine someone trying to steal your laptop, and the built-in webcam on your laptop takes a photo of the thief and sends the photo to a secure private server that you can log into. Wow - that’s an innovative security system. I’m downloading Adeona now …

Lesson 9: Keep Your “Problems” in Perspective

Scott Maxwell is the Mars Rover Driver Team Lead for the Mars Exploration Rover project at NASA. Wow.  Did you get that?  Scott drives robots - on MARS.  Cool!

Scott shared a lot of fascinating information with us about this project.  I’m sure I won’t do his talk justice, so be sure to check out the recorded video of the presentation (I’ll post a link soon).

I do want to share a closing comment made by Scott, however.  It was unforgettable. So inspiring.

Showing us a photo of Earth, as taken by one of the Rovers on Mars,  Scott explained that this one photo was his favorite of thousands of photos taken because it shows Earth in perspective. Scott pointed out a dot on the screen.  He explained:

“This dot [Earth as seen from Mars] represents us, everyone we know, and everyone they know. It represents all the wars, and droughts, and everything happening on our planet. Seeing Earth in this perspective suggests we are small and insignificant.  It also suggests all of our achievements are small and insignificant. And - this is a good thing.

Why? Because if we are small, and if our achievements are small, then it also suggests that …

what we think are our big problems, are also very very small as well.”

When Scott was done sharing this closing thought, the audience stood up with great applause and gave a standing ovation.

Thank You!

A big thank you to Chris Pirillo and Ponzi for organizing and hosting this wonderful conference. As a first-timer to Gnomedex, I enjoyed every minute.  The overall good energy and 5-star caliber of this conference are both a tribute to the hosts for sure. It is a friendly, laid-back, and fun conference filled with good lessons to take home.  I am so glad I had the oportunity to attend, and look forward to the next one: Gnomedex09.  The countdown has begun - I hope to see everyone there again! : )