Triangle Bloggers Conference 2005

Technorati tags are amazing. I retro-added them to my archive yesterday morning, and by afternoon my post on Duke Power squashing my solar power project was featured on www.greensboro101.com and somebody had invited me to this morning's Triangle Bloggers Conference 2005. So I attended!

This will surely be an over-reported event. The aftermath will be like family reunion scrapbooks, every picture's subject being a family member taking a picture of the picture taker. Or like the "parties" my Jewish Chorale has, where we sit in front of a big-screen tv and watch the movie (riveting, I might add) of our last concert. Has it been discussed, blogged about, linked, and cross-referenced ad nauseum that recursiveness plagues the blogosphere?

Prochein Amy was kind enough to ask me to report on the blogcon. Thanks, Amy, don't mind if I do. I am delighted to get such a kindly soft-ball of a question. You know, the way we read in Parade Magazine, "Dear Parade, what ever happened to [insert name of Obscure Has-been]?" answered by, "Gentle Reader, why funny you should ask, Has-been just this week released a new ...!"

Anyway, there was a small army of happy bloggers and about 30 boxes of donuts at 8:30 in the morning on the UNC campus. The donuts and trashcan were presided over by an antique armless statue with a fig leaf, I guess he is the Classics Department mascot.

There were, as always, mixers and skulkers; being a skulker I sat on the stairs and watched the mixers have a good time. Skulking is fun too. I could guess who was important because many bodies turned toward the august ones as they floated by smiling beneficently. Everybody was nice and friendly, nobody was mean and crabby. Snarkiness was absent.

We shuffled into a lecture hall where two ominous blue screens caused me to rail silently: "OH NO, POWERPOINT!" Luckily, no. One was projecting blogs and the other was projecting our very images via webcam so in case things needed to get even more recursive we could read our own blogs and simultaneously watch ourselves on tv.

Being a skulker, I took an escapable position at the rear next to a door. This convenient position meant I got interviewed by a nice young boy from The Daily TarHeel. Of course I'm not much of a spokesperson for the blogosphere, since I've only been here for a month, but this did not keep me from speaking up (by which you know I DO belong here). I told him proudly I am a card-carrying member of the Long Tail, which I didn't know until I attended this conference!

(We, the innumerable masses of the Long Tail, do and think things which are endlessly uninteresting to 99% of humanity. However, if you put all us outliers together, more than half of humanity would find at least one of us interesting. Did I get that right? Well, does somebody who sings Serbian and Mariachi music qualify or not? Finally, I find my peer group!)

I snuck out early, so theoretically I could have scooped the event! How thrilling! However, any such nascent ambition on my part was forestalled by the winking hard-drive lights of 100+ wirelessly connected laptops in our lecture hall, owners blogging busily away in real time. I can't keep up.

By the way [local content], in case you wonder what Triangle this is, it comprises the cities and countryside in the middle of North Carolina, too far away from both the mountains and the beach. It's near the Triad. Confused yet? What we used to have: tobacco. What we have now: traffic, pollution, and the Research Triangle Park -- that's a sub-triangle of the uber-triangle, don't get confused -- and also, according to boastful signage, "The City of Medicine." I would like to tell you more, but having just been in the company of scores of experts, I suggest you check out their sites instead.

p.s. and it begins... for a wrap-up of the part of the conference I missed: Sally Greene.

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