The Feedmesh after school meeting last night was the big buzz of the evening last night. I had four or five folks come up to me and thank me for coming to the event to give the publishers perspective on the FeedMesh project.

So, what is the FeedMesh?
OK, here is the basic idea: When a blog is updated it pings—sends a signal—to a number of services to let them know that the content has been updated. This method, of the blog pinning the search engine, is much more efficient then the blog search engines check the blog every day, hour, or minute to try and see if there has been an update.

Right now blog software, and bloggers, ping dozens of sites including pingomatic, weblogs.com, blo.gs (now part of yahoo), and the individual services (technorati, feedster, etc). So, Bob from Pubsub suggested that there be a “cloud” which has all the updates in it that the blog search engines can tap into. One service to unite them all, if you will.

This Feedmesh as you can imagine, is just starting to become powerful, and with  great power comes great responsibility—and controversy.

My first question was “who owns and controls this?” I might as well have thrown a grenade in the room. This was a room full of tech people mainly—the people who do the work. The CEOs of Feedster and Technorati were not in the room, for example, but their tech guys were.  That  

On stage now at Gnomedex are Scott Rafer (Feedster), Mark Fletcher (Bloglines), Bob Wyman (Pub Sub) (left to right in the photo) talking about how they think RSS will evolve. Wyman is surprised that RSS hasn't evolved much in the last year, and thinks only large economics -- like the take off of RSS on mobile phones - will change the format now. Fletcher agrees that there haven't been many innovations in extensions, but he's not really worried about that. He sees RSS as a universal inbox, keeping track of only what you haven't read yet. He's looking forward to RSS continuing to keep track of all sorts of data and creep into more areas like flight notifications, package tracking.

The room is silent as personal blogger Julie Leung speaks eloquently about why she shares personal stories on her blog, Seedlings & Sprouts. She tells us that when we share stories we find family, we find friends, we find our tribe. She says we're creating our own version of what our mothers didn't tell us for our own children. She makes this roomful of mostly geekly guys go totally silent. She makes me laugh. She makes me cry. She is brilliant!

I just posted a bunch of photos from the first day of Gnomedex on Flickr. They're tagged Gnomedex. See if you know who's who.

Got to Gnomedex late today... heading over to the party now. Was able to attend Pubsub's discussion of the a common feed cloud being used by Technorati, Pubsub, Feedster, etc. Was really interesting to see Google and Yahoo in the same room as Technorati and Feedster discussing, essentially, the foundation of their competition. Sort of like a bunch of NBA and college players sitting down and deciding what the rules to their upcoming game will be.

One of the best sessions of the first afternoon of Gnomedex was the panel on open source projects with Asa Dotzler (Mozilla), Matt Mullenweg (WordPress), Matt Westervelt (SeattleWireless.net) and Scott Collins (Mozilla). The panel threw out lots of ideas for connecting to your user base, including these tips on designing the product web site:

• include screen shots about the product on the site;
• put the download button on the home page so users don't have to drill down through the site to get to the download;
• include a tagline that tells viewers why they need your software;
• add affiliate tags to your home page;
• get a real designer to design your site (Tip from Matt Westervelt: The best way to get a designer to volunteer to help you is to put up a really bad-looking site.)

An all-star team just got off the stage at Gnomedex -- Steve Gillmor, Doug Kaye, Dave Winer, Adam Curry, Dan Gillmor, and Dean Hachamovitch (with Scoble in the audience with the mic). It's awesome to see them all together and to have the opportunity to talk to any one of them here at Gnomedex.

One thing that caught my attention in this panel's wide-ranging discussion was Doug Kaye's statement that the people in this room are only a small portion of the audience that will be influenced by this conference, which is being podcast live to hundreds of thousands.

The first morning at Gnomedex was big. First Dave Winer demonstrated his baby, "The" OPML Editor, showing some of what it can do -- from updating a blog to exhanging outlines.  Then Microsoft General Manager Dave Hachamovitch demonstrated Longhorn's support for RSS, including integration of a common RSS feed with Windows applications, support for variety of media types as RSS feed content, and support for lists.

Microsoft demoed the RSS features in IE 7 - shown publicly for the first time here at Gnomedex. Microsoft also announced that it's making two Simple List Extensions available today under a Creative Commons attribution share license (praised in a Webcam appearance by Larry Lessig).

Dean Hachamovitch, Longhorn Browsing and RSS Technologies General Manager, just took the stage at Gnomedex. We're anticipating a big announcement.

I'm finally here in Seattle for Gnomedex. I took the bus from the airport, checked into the hotel, and now I'm typing fast so I can get outside and check out the city. I'll walk down towards the water, visit Pike Place Market, and then maybe head north toward Myrtle Edwards Park, where I hear the Seattle Art Museum is sponsoring an outdoor party. It's more likely that I'll just follow my camera lens around and see where it takes me. The ultimate destination is the Odyssey Maritime Center at Pier 66 for Gnomedex registration and a reception tonight. See you there Gnomedexers.

I'm in the sky looking down through the clouds at Seattle. I see water, lots of green, trees everywhere. We're descending. I think about the other Gnomedexers who are leaving their homes this morning in different cities, all to converge in Seattle. It's so very cool.

5:30 a.m. Someone's knocking, knocking in my dreams. I turn over to shut out the noise, and then . . . snap awake. It's the airport shuttle driver, muttering angrily under his breath as I stumble to the door wrapped in my sheet. Thank goodness I finished packing last night. I pull on my jeans and t-shirt, grab my bag, and stumble to the van barefoot, sneakers in hand, hair uncombed. The other passengers glare at me for making them wait. We pull away. The journey to Seattle and Gnomedex begins.

I'll be heading up to Gnomedex on Thursday afternoon from Los Angeles and staying till Saturday night. I'm speaking on a panel on Saturday afternoon about blogging best practices with Denise Howell and Buzz Bruggeman--two really smart folks. I'm no lawyer, so I'll be giving you the uninformed opinion on the panel. :-)  Should be fun. Adam Curry is giving the closing keynote after our talk so I bet we will still have some audience there.

We'll be doing regular updates here, and linking to all the tags on Technorati, Del.icio.us, and Flickr. If you have any other links to people blogging or tag farms feel free to dump them in the comments below.