My Gnomedex Post: Create Something

I was lucky enough to attend Gnomedex ’09 late last week, the third time I’ve joined Chris Pirillo and team for one of my favorite annual tech conferences. If you follow tech blogs, or can wade through the spam on the #gnomedex hashtag, you can find thousands of great recaps of the parties (which I couldn’t attend) and the many presentations (which I made it for most of). So many quality recaps, in fact, that I’m not going to do my own traditional-style conference trip report blog post.

Rather, I’ll just leave you with my #1 takeaway from it all: Those who create, win.

Hugh Macleod’s cartoon, shown above, is one of my favorites. If I could afford the limited addition print of it, I would slap it up on my office wall and breathe it in every morning.

“Create or die!” is an extreme way of putting it (most everything Hugh does comes off as extreme, which is part of why he stands out), but it dovetails nicely with so much of what I came away from Gnomedex thinking.

At the event, we heard from people who created a movement, created masterpieces of YouTube buzz (the secret being naked people farting, in case you’re wondering) along with a documentary on hope and opportunity, an online movement towards healthy skepticism, a physical art form version of nerd-dom, a kind of spammy but still very useful and wildly popular Twitter meme, and a fairly tale about digital life (Ignite presentation…sorry, can’t find a useful link). Among many others.

These excellent presenters all built wildly different things, but they still got out there and created something that expressed a bit of themselves and had an impact on others. They didn’t just analyze, discuss, or pontificate. They put something out there for the world to see and make what it would of it.

These are the kinds of people I get energy from, and why I love Gnomedex and eclectic conferences like it as sources of motivation and inspiration. Nice work Chris and team! Now, off to work on my own bubbling pots of creativity to see what comes out of it all.

Side note: I highly recommend buying the album “Maisha Magumu” from the documentary Bongo, filmed by Jay and Leah with GiantAntMedia. It’s for a good cause, yes, but it’s also great music for window-down driving on a sunny afternoon. Enjoy.

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