Slashdot Review – Produced by SDR News

Day one at the Gnomedex conference. You have to give Chris Pirillo credit for taking risks in maintaining the energy of the conference.

John Edwards was the keynote speaker, and appeared to be under some constraints on his content. There was considerable concern that the segment would degrade into a political event. Since this was an un-conference, he had few formal remarks and did mostly questions and answers. Several chances to rise to the bait – and he generally did a good job keeping from becoming too politicized. In summary, the session was almost content free. Phil Torrone of Make Magazine asked a question concerning open source on voting machines, but in general there were fewer questions and more statements. If he had high expectations of learning from the group, I suspect that he went away with not too much more than he came in with. In balance, I hope that he felt the trip was worthwhile.

The afternoon sessions improved: The Attention Economy is a whole powerful thing – but getting one or two glances and figuring out what the next action is a good deal more difficult.

The most interesting session came late in the day – demos of new products and platforms

Pixsy Visual Search - is an indexing snapshot of visual of photos and video on web. They offer photo/video search engines with a focus on social sites, where they can customize the topic or tag – for example Funny video search engines or sports video serach engines. As it searches, it generates a slide show of the material as it streams in , then presents the page. It’s the photographic content of the NY Times in a second and a half, then the thumbnails are displayed. – a quick visual digest of the entire day’s news. This will revolutionize the idea of video news -and it drives back the traffic to the site, and so the content providers are happy as well. Watch this one !. Literally.

Melodeo.com just launched their new website to augment their mobile phone service – with the goal of creating the best podcast listening experience online. Combining social networking a directory listing and embedded player, you can visit friends page, subscribe to others while you continue to listen. It uses friend as your “filter”, on the theory that you would probably enjoy something that your friend would recommend.

The really cool thing – your playlist continues to play. And, when you hit pause in your office, you are able to hop into your car, and resume your podcast listening, just where you left off, on your mobile phone.

Mark Cantor took the stage again, with technology to move between social networks. It’s called the PeopleAggregator.net site. You can hit a button, spawn off your own network – your Friendster, MySpace, Jotspot, Sxip, flickr, LiveID, for transfer of social network between the sites.

The new venture for Todd Cochrane’s company RawVoice is Blubrry.com. Blubrry is a new venture for podcasters, combining podcasts and social networking into a page oriented player system .It’s a way to find sites, and give podcasters a second point of presence, and tie in advertising opportunities for podcasters.

Lots of networking at an evening dinner at the Museum of Flight - and a great chance to link up with a lot of interesting people – one of the most outstanding attributes of Gnomedex. Only problem with that is a very tired host compiling things around midnight.

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