inessential by Brent Simmons

More fun at Gnomedex

The best part of Gnomedex—the best part of any good conference—is seeing people you haven’t seen in a while and meeting new people.

It was great to see folks like Steve Gillmor, Dave Winer, and Marc Canter who I’ve met before. (I worked for Dave for many years, as most of you know, but I hadn’t seen him for a while.)

I met some new (to me) people... There’s no way I can mention everybody, but here are a few.

Nick Bradbury is someone I’ve emailed with many times that I wanted to meet. We have a lot in common as independent developers (though Nick now works with the NewsGator folks)—and I have great admiration for FeedDemon.

It was Nick who convinced me to go to Gnomedex. And I’m so glad he did, not least because I got the chance to meet him. (If you’ve met him before, you know what a thoroughly likable fellow he is.)

I didn’t get to talk to Adam Curry for more than a couple minutes, but I was glad I got the chance to meet him. He and Dave Winer started doing things together while I was still working at UserLand, but our paths had never crossed.

It was Adam who convinced us to add support for enclosures and podcasts to NetNewsWire. It was a major feature request last fall, lots of people were asking for it, but it was finally a short email from Adam that was the tipping point. He said it seemed like it would be a “slam-dunk” for us. Who could resist that? Not me.

Doug Kaye (fellow AO/Technorati Open Media 100 trendsetter!) is a flat-out nice guy. We’d emailed a few times before, and it was great to meet him. IT Conversations is, as you know, one of the coolest things on the web.

Rex Hammock—I want to call him the “distinguished gentleman from Tennessee.” (I’d vote for him for senator!) We met at the party at the new Seattle Public Library Friday night, where he took a picture of Nick Bradbury, Dave Winer, Sheila, and me.

There are plenty more cool people I met, but this post would be 20 times longer if I mentioned everybody, so I’ll stop here. I’ll end with this: Gnomedex 2005 was great. I’m already looking forward to the next one!