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 The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.

Photo by Jason Smith from the BlogPhiladelphia photo pool.

A great unconference puts the focus on the people, and makes it as easy as possibly for all of the participants to meet, learn, and share with each other. If you haven't done it before, it probably sounds like a schmoozefest. But really at each of the unconferences I've participated in(and BlogPhilly was no exception) I've found the vast majority of conversations in sessions and in the hallways, restaurants, and bars to be exceedingly human and useful. Sometimes you still get the occasional participant obviously trying to directly pitch a business to you, but I think that's chalkable to inexperience with the format.

Here's a small sampling of some of the people I had a chance to talk to:

• Lisa Moore -- I always appreciate meeting EarthLink users out in the wild. Lisa introduced herself as an EarthLink DSL customer. Lisa and her husband run Toonamation, a company that can efficiently give photos and video all sorts of illustrated looks.
  Here's what I look like as a Toonamated piece of art:
  

  Lisa explained that she's looking for ways to upgrade her broadband speeds and/or save some money. She was also looking for portable internet service she could take with her since she travels locally a fair bit. I explained how the EarthLink Wi-Fi Philly network works, and told her about our new freestanding DSL in Verizon territories, which might help her to save a little money. She's a user of one of the other portals out there(ahem), and hadn't yet heard about our start page redesign. I gave her a quick tour and hope to hear back from her on what she thinks.
  

• Alex Hillman -- It was inspiring to hear Alex talk about his Independents Hall coworking project and all of the energy around software development in Philadelphia. Coworking is "cafe-like community/collaboration space for developers, writers and independents. Or, it's like this: start with a shared office and add cafe culture." I also overheard him talking about Phillycarshare.org, which is a not-for-profit version of services like Zipcar and Flexcar. I just recently joined his Twitter feed, and am enjoying eavesdropping on all of the meetups, groups, and development going on seemingly all the time in Philly.
  
• The Viddler Guys -- I didn't get a chance to get to talk to them at length, but enjoyed hanging out at the Triumph reception on Thursday night. Later as I looked at clips Alex pointed to on Viddler.com, I wish I had spoken to them more. One of the neat things about Viddler(which is a video hosting and sharing service) is its built-in commenting system that lets you elegantly attach comments and tags to a point on the timeline.
  
• Chris O'Donnell of TechDirt -- Chris' personal business card gets a huge heh for the tagline "I am not the actor." He did a great job keeping a somewhat contentious session on blog and commenting revenue models at a low roar.
  
• Joey Sweeney -- Joey's session on City Blogs was really enjoyable and insightful. Josh highlighted a good quote about collaboration between blogs: "It's like being in a band and playing gigs other with bands. Sometimes you become friends with another band and other times you wonder how the other band even got the gig." I hope we have a chance to sit in with them at some point.
  
• Greg Goldman, Agnes Ogletree, and Ryan Nichols -- I ducked away from the conference briefly on Thursday evening to check out the offices of our partner, Wireless Philadelphia. Thanks to Greg and Ryan for showing me around and getting me up to speed on some of the things they've got going on. The next morning they stopped by BlogPhilly and got a taste of what we were up to at the unconference as well. You can follow them via their blogs and their newsletter.

• Jacob Patton -- Turns out Jacob built Conferenceer, a site I used(and really liked) at the SXSW festival to find out who was sitting in the audience around me, and which panels had the most promise. It was great to put a developer and face to the software. I had no idea Jacob was an East Coast guy.

There are more people I met but haven't mentioned, and lots of people I didn't get a chance to meet. Check out the conference wiki and Technorati to eavesdrop on all of the other conversations that took place. There are also a couple of photo sets if you want to see what it all looked like.

As an aside, I have to mention that the ballpark-style snacks(pretzels, peanuts in shells, candy bars, etc.) were a great idea:

Thanks again to Annie, Caroline, James, Alex, the GPTMC team, and everyone else who helped for hosting such a great event.