Earthling

Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.

I just got back from the all-day BrainJams conferency thing and I'm awash with thoughts. It was a fantastic experience. One of the things that really made it special was the blend of people there. Every participant enriched the conversations and brought in a perspective I wouldn't have had otherwise. And for the most part, these are a group of complete strangers with different reasons for showing up. I couldn't have predicted that we'd get along so well together as a group or have so many stimulating conversations. As an employee of a big technology company, it helped me learn about projects I didn't know about, see some old ideas in new ways, witness first-hand what people find useful about the tools around us, learn about what New Orleans has been through and the best ways to help, and consider some common challenges in different ways. I even met an EarthLink customer in the flesh and got to solicit some thoughts from her about us.

I want to highlight all of the people I met and many of the ideas that I take back with me, and I will do that shortly. But my time is limited at the moment, so for now I'd just like to give you a taste of the diversity of people who I had the priviledge of spending the day with. There was Scott, who lived through Katrina and its aftermath, and runs a business that laser-cuts stainless steel jigsaw puzzles (wow!). And Alan, who developed a set of smart tools to help people find information and contacts post-Katrina. And Chris and Blake who built a great new search interface, Huckabuck.com. And Jerry, a many-year veteran of the Technology and PR worlds. And Brian, who lives in Slidell and runs the consultancy WeblogsWork.com and helped develop some blogging and podcasting tools that I'm going to start using immediately.

One of the recurring themes was about how as humans, we've gotten away from this type of thing -- from having in-the-flesh conversations, especially with strangers. I think we all need more of this.

Here's my Flickr set of photos from today's event.

More later. Off to a wrap-up dinner.

Update: Yesterday morning before BrainJams got started, Chris Heuer interviewed me via podcast about corporate blogging. You can listen to our conversation on BeyondBlogging2006.com, where Chris blogs professionally about the changing world of PR and Communications.