As I'm sure everyone and her brother at Gnomedex will blog, John Edwards appearance at Gnomedex6 was front-page news for the Seattle-PI today.

Great job, Todd. I met Todd Thursday night ever so briefly at the early registration and he seemed like a super-nice guy. We talked briefly, but he was busy being ushered about by Steve Gillmor and had to keep up.

So, speaking of Mr. Gillmor: I'm sure he does deserve an achievement badge and all that. But I think until someone like Malcolm Gladwell gets ahold of the key concepts behind attention and what it leads to, no one is going to get it. The VC to my left didn't get it. The web entrepreneur to my right didn't get it. I understand the basics, but I don't get the day-to-day next big thing relevance. Chris asked Gillmor a question to try to expand on the concept and help folks. Nope, didn't help.

To tell you the truth, until there's a break-through (the closest being, that I've noticed, is http://share.opml.org/ ) I'm going to be in the interested-but-skeptical majority.

Quick fun story: I met Blake Ross Thursday night, too, near the end of the event. I really like Blake. So, we had fun with me being with Microsoft and he feigning an immediate 180 degree retreat. Matter and anti-matter and all that (my comment when someone came up, surprised to see Blake talking to a Microsoftie). Blake's now focused on his stealth-mode startup, post-Firefox. Okay, so last night we had an end of evening raffle at the Museum of Flight. I had something like 560 and 561. Blake?

666.

I'm sure there are folks at Microsoft to whom Firefox has given some level of indigestion to that would appreciate that numeric designation.

gnomedex - Eric Richards