Okay, one full day of Gnomedex6 down, except for the product launches and the evening party. Other folks are doing a great job coming up with detailed descriptions of each presenter and you can find more by looking up the Gnomedex tag (RSS link). Here are some of the things that stood out for me today:

Microsoft presented a signed, framed take down notice to Chris regarding that whole Vista Beta2 "eh! stop doing that!" torrent episode. Sort of a "Sorry we had to do that," kind of thing. Now, given that Microsoft is a key sponsor of Gnomedex and are giving out lots of Microsoft Vista goodies in the gift bag and such, I'm super super surprised that there is almost zero Microsoft presence. No one here to show off Vista or Office. Well, there's an Xbox games room but wouldn't it be more useful for some of the leaders in Vista or Office to be here to hear feedback from some of the innovation leadership here?

Maybe we're just keeping a low - and generous - profile.

Today I got to discover that Marc Canter is a hoot and just a little bit of a coot. He certainly had a rather base way of asking Senator Edwards some questions. He then later talked about Open Standards and how openness is better than... closedness. Derek made the best basic point in that he wants to easily get his data in and out, and that's what openness, and open standards, allows. But I think that open standards become more of an issue than a help when the standards precede the implementation or the need for the implementation.

Chris wasn't too pleased with how Senator Edwards presentation turned out. He was hoping for a more geeky-level of questions and conversation with the Senator so that this crowd could assist an influential politician, and most likely Presidential Candidate, understand important technical issues, like Net Neutrality, and how best to leverage technology as part of having an open and transparent relationship with society. Anyway, too much in the way of political questions and not a whole lot in the world of deep tech.

I was really interested in learning, once and for all, what good all this localized and non-spreading excitement is over the Attention Economy since all I've been able to conjure up, reading about it, is what-the-eff? Steve Gillmor got up there and talked about it, but all I can say after he talked and answered questions is double-what-the-eff? He seems to be up there singing the praise of some religion that I can't get the slightest foggiest notion about. I mean, I read the attention based economy paper and understood the basics there: the more people pay attention to what you do gives you more power and influence in today's information economy. But what Gillmor is trying to flip that into is muddled. He's hoping Ray Ozzie steps into this. Well, if this is important I guess I do, too, because I trust Ray to bring clarity and implementation to it.

Okay, Canter is a little bit of a coot. Steve is full-on coot, and cranky, to boot.

Scoble asked on Microsoft Office, now that he's post-Microsoft: "It's not dead yet, but its death is coming." I think there was an "unless... web..." in there, but folks pretty much asked the mic to be yanked.

gnomedex - Eric Richards