Listen Live Now! Gnomedex 6 is officially under way. You can listen in to the conference both Friday and Saturday via the same Limelight Networks stream we use for The Chris Pirillo Show.

Senator John Edwards has officially signed on as our Keynote. The senator is a long-standing supporter of technology - including podcasting and blogging. Every year, we wonder how we’re going to top ourselves. When conversations started with Senator John Edwards’ office, they were intrigued and enthralled with our approach to content! Senator Edwards will quickly turn his time over to the Gnomedex audience, fielding questions and fostering discussion over how technology could and should play a role in our world. You can see Senator Edwards live on video from 11:45-12:30 Pacific on Friday, June 30.

Tune in to Gnomedex now!

You won’t believe it - TechMeme has been hacked. I figured it was just a matter of time before something like this happened, and the Gnomedexers discovered it before anybody else did. If only Gabe was in the crowd, he might have stopped this from happening in the first place. Let’s just see how many people discover TechMeme (formerly Memeorandum) has been hacked this before Gabe does?

OPML is great - and for feed organization, it’s equally awesome. Just about every news aggregator supports importing and exporting OPML, but there hasn’t yet emerged an OPML icon design that is equally as appealing as the “standard” feed icon set forth by Firefox and subsequently adopted by the industry. In working with information architects on TagJag, we decided to dedicate some cycles to designing an OPML icon for use on the site:

Before you ask, I did float this past Dave (who didn’t like it much, but suggested I ask others what they thought of it). We’re certainly open to suggestions, but as it stands - this is the design we’re gonna use for linking to OPML files. It’s pretty much like the “standard” feed icon, but it’s… different. Check out OPMLIcons.com.

I love to laugh - so now I’m preparing the world to bLaugh! Today, we’re launching the (un)Official comic of the blogosphere - colorful, satirical, and comical. Expect parodies of “A-List” bloggers all the way down to the meme of the day - no holds barred. Brad Fitzpatrick is bLaugh’s artist, and I’m the writer. The strip is exclusively sponsored by a single company, GoDaddy. We have a bLaugh feed for you to suck down - and we’ll rotate the daily comic image in a static URL to encourage deep-linking from anywhere (widgets, anyone?). Of course, all you ego-whores should be watching closely - because you’re likely the ones to be parodied on a regular basis. If you blog, or your name (brand) is getting tossed around in the blogosphere, you’re on our radar. That includes you, Hugh and Jacek (because we love everybody equally).

I swear, I’m not leaving anybody out intentionally (if I do, I will edit the post if corrected appropriately). I hate naming names because I really want to give everybody credit for the help they’ve given us for Gnomedex 6 activities. If your name gets left out, I promise to make it up to you. Thanks goes to:

• Ponzi!
• My parents: Joe & Judy Pirillo
• Sponsors: Microsoft; Yahoo; GoDaddy; Ask; AMD; CacheFly; MindJet; PRWeb; Waggener Edstrom; WetPaint; WeatherBug; WhatCounts
• Volunteers: Aryeh Goretsky; Lockergnome Forum Moderators; Boris Mann; Kosso; Andru & Monica Edwards; Harry Hayes; Maryam Scoble (and her friend, Leyla); Nancy Folsom; Jake Ludington; Brandon Paddock;
• Discussion Leaders and Participants: Steve Gillmor; Werner Vogels; Susan Mernit; Steve Rubel; Pud Kaplan; pt; Michael Arrington ; Marc Canter; Halley Suitt; Ethan Kaplan; Dave Winer; Dave Dederer; Chris Messina; John Edwards; Blake Ross; Robert Scoble
• Gnomedexers: past, present, and future
• Core Lockergnome Team: Bob Fogarty; Shayne Sweeney; Matt Hartley; Mitch Keeler; Diana Huggins; Countless Contributing Authors

If you were looking to view or share the airline safety video that I presented to the Gnomedexers at the top of the hour, it’s been online for quite a while. Link away, though the original video is currently sitting on YouTube. I keep trying to tell people to subscribe to my feed, but noooooooooooo… they prefer laughing at my antics when I have them as a captive audience.

At Gnomedex…

1. Be courteous to your fellow attendees
2. Stay open to new ideas and discussions
3. Food and beverage are “unlimited” at Bell Harbor
4. Plan on attending the parties, please!?!
5. Blog, Cast, Snap, Share - it’s yours
6. Always use the microphone
7. WiFi access is capped, up and down
8. Tag your posts “Gnomedex”
9. We aim to stay on schedule
10. Assume your photo will be taken
11. Ponzi and Chris are at your service
12. The Discussion Leader is in charge
13. Everybody gets an invite to discussion lists
14. Assume everything you say will be blogged
15. Lunch and food at dinnertime are on us
16. PowerPoint presentations suck
17. We will have a live audio stream
18. “Official” audio and video podcasts will be availble
19. Additional t-shirts are $20 apiece

I also must note the scheduled announcements, launches, and demos on Friday afternoon. They’ve got 10 minutes (or less) to show us what they’ve got. We figured this was a great way for you to discover a few new tools - and actually watch them being used rather than reading written reviews:

• WetPaint - Launching!
• Bluedot.us - Launching!
• SecondLife - Demystification!
• Pixsy - Announcement!
• Farecast - Blogification!
• Melodeo - Announcement!

And now, for something completely different.

If you’re having trouble getting through the official streaming page, you need only to know these links:

• Audio is streaming live (Sponsored by GoDaddy)
• We have an IRC chat room online
• Video will be live only for the Senator’s keynote (through the official streaming page, and if you have any problems with it, please ask for help in the chat room).

I’ve had a few people ask me what to tag their posts as for Gnomedex. I say (and have always said) just tag things “Gnomedex” and leave it at that. If you wanna get fancy, you can also do Gnomedex6, Gnomedex06, Gnomedex2006, or SirNotAppearingInThisFilm. For maximum flash efficiency, stick with “Gnomedex” and call it a day. The only other tag we’d like to recommend is “GnomedexDiscussion” - for the times when you’d like to make a comment on something that’s being said at the conference - specifically when we run out of time for a discussion on-site. If you want to watch what’s happening with any of the keywords, you can import any of the following into your news aggregator from TagJag:

• http://tagjag.com/blogs/gnomedex/opml (Recommended)
• http://tagjag.com/all/gnomedex/opml (Large!)
• http://tagjag.com/blogs/gnomedex/rss (Single Feed, Beta)
• http://tagjag.com/all/gnomedex/rss (Single Feed, Beta)

TagJag outputs OPML and RSS without you ever needing to visit the site! Plus, it combines tag search directories (fresh, like Flickr, Technorati, or de.l.ici.ou.s) with traditional search directories (static, like Yahoo!, Ask, or MSN).

I love our community. From Eric’o'theque, Gnomedex Outlook Contacts from the Gnomedex OPML. It doesn’t work with Outlook 2000, though:

Here’s something interesting for the other attendees: Chris released the OPML of the folks registered for Gnomedex. Dave pointed to a directory listing web page created out of the OPML. Over the weekend and a few recent late nights, I ran a script to get the OPML into Outlook as contacts and then decided to put snapshots of the various speakers into the contact cards, along with throwing in categories for Gnomedex and Gnomedex-Speaker.

Then I gave the mouse a cookie.

I decided, hey, why not get to know all of your fellow attendees by visiting their given web page. And, hey, if they have a headshot, why not throw that into their contact info. Oh, and, hey, if they have a bio or such, why not throw that into their contact details.

This got a little carried away. So I’d like to share it, if I could: Outlook contacts for Gnomedex 06.

pt is sending out a warning: “the airports are fzcked today, tell everyone to get to the airports like 3 hours in advance, my flight took off without most of the people because of the lines, and now we’re playing the standby game for the day… so, i might not make it to the party tonight, fyi - but i will be at the airport drinking as soon as the bar opens while i wait to dull the pain.”

Ethan Kaplan (no relation to Pud) wants to talk about blackrimglasses.com“>buying digital audio and video:

The $39 Dollar Song and 6 Cent Ringtone didn’t really light up the charts on the TechMeme saturated blogosphere, but it is a valid discussion to have, especially when the business of content is exploding as it is (to use Jeff Jarvis’ parlance). I know that being from a record company, people will immediately look to me to talk about DRM and the RIAA. I will avoid the latter, and only address the former in the context of the discussion about abstraction and mutability and how it relates to Value.

I like buying content subscriptions. I hate buying content ala carte. I love buying physical products from my favorite artists.

HOT DAMN! “Avivo Video Converter Extension for Windows Media Center Edition - Catalyst 6.6 introduces a Windows Media Center Edition Video Conversion utility. This utility will allow users to convert video content that is either recorded or available to Media Center Edition to a variety of different formats. The video content can be converted to MPEG-2, MPEG-4 SP, MPEG-4/AVC and Windows Media. iPod video and Sony PSP’s are also supported with an optimized profile for these devices.”