BloggerCon
Neal Stephenson, for all his wonders-of-technology prophesizing, has often pushed the theme that no machine will ever be able to convincingly reproduce the full emotional depth of a human. They might pass the Turing Test based on content, but when it comes to true subtlety of expression, anything but actual human contact comes up short.
BloggerCon was a good reminder of that. Reading someone’s site for a couple months of course makes me feel like I know them, but a couple hours in meatspace does so much so quickly. On Saturday night I had dinner with AKMA and his son, Andrew Grumet, Lisa Williams, and Joey deVilla. Then a couple of us went over to the Commander Hotel (which Joey insistently referred to as the Commodore Hotel) and met Joi Ito (fresh from Tokyo), Kevin Marks, and a handful of others.
Today, at the Day 2 sessions, I got to hear from Kevin Marks, Oliver Willis, Jeff Jarvis, Scott Heiferman, Dan Gilmor, and David Weinberger, plus dozens more I didn’t know of before.
I took some good notes, listed some books I’ll really have to read now, and found out about a lot of interesting topics.
Also, if I’d known I was going to run into Elizabeth Spiers I would have planned something clever to say.