Susan reflects upon her own Gnomedex discussion leadership experience:

As one blogger said, there was no way the room full of (mostly) male geeks felt ready to share their own thoughts and feelings about such personal stories on the web–people in the audience seemed far more focused on the possibility that anything one exposed–under your own name–like smutty jokes from when you were 14–would live in Google’s search results forever and make employers and investors made and ruin your reputation (Pud, aka Phil Kaplan, amusingly refuted this one during the Q&A, thank you).

So once I got over the fact there wasn’t going to be a big open discussion with everyone jumping right in (did I really think that?), it was all good–There’s nothing like dancing on the edge of your comfort zone in public, right? I made the points I wanted to make and shared what seemed appropriate–And my talk hopefull added some fresh thinking to the conference.

(Aside) All afternoon, post session, people kept coming up to me and sharing comments and stories, so final cut would be that this topic was hard to talk about in public, but that many folks had much to say…just not in a group.

Judge for yourself:

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