Saturday nightI rode my bike over to CELL Space after a long day of work. We're busting ass to push out a huge piece of functionality at the ol day job, and I didn't get down to Webzine til about 7:00.
The sidewalk in front of the CELL is mobbed when I pull up. Nary a pole to lock my bike to, I happen to find a guy who's unlocking his, and pull mine over to nab the vacated spot. We laugh that the bike parking problem is not much different from the car parking problem around here, except, of course, that you never talk to the person who swoops in behind you in their car.
I go inside and they give me an unlaminated name tag with instructions to go to a big table that's covered with old, cut up magazines and pens. People are making their own name tags by cutting out whatever they want, sticking them on to a cardboard backing and having them laminated when they're done.
I opt out of that, stick my name tag in my bag and head in.
There are --- shit, I don't even know how many there are, but it's a LOT of people sitting in chairs watching a panel lead by Ryan (event mastermind who coordinated this whole thing) about what we can learn from non-Web independent media. Stephen Dunifer is here. He's the guy behind Radio Free Berkeley and has been on my radar for years as a fucker in radioland fighting for his FCC license.
The energy in the room is palpable. The crowd is comprised of folks in total burning man regalia, others in jeans/t-shirts, lots of digital media...people video taping, photographing, recording, taking notes in their Palm Pilots.
The company for whom I've recently agreed to give the better part of my creative energy is there. We are a sponsor this event, and I am totally delighted at the convergence of my two worlds. I wander to find three of my co-workers talking to folks, giving them demos, schwag etc.
Eddie comes over and we call up the webcast on our laptop to see how it's going. The video is pretty seamless, the audio, too, save for the globby sound quality of RealAudio and some crappy tinny speakers. How funny this will be when we're old -- huddling over those little speakers -- "I remember the day when Internet broadcasts were a full 20 seconds behind real time!"
I go upstairs to check out the webzine-making workshop area. The space is rigged up with ten or so computers, painted in opaque tempera colors, with fuzzy toys and crazy crap glued to them. There are people at each machine -- but unlike every other conference I've attended, these people aren't checking their email; they're clustered around a machine and talking about various sites -- design, content, ideas.
I meet a guy who developed an open source document publishing system and we start talking about the Bill Joy article and the Kurtzweil book. He gives me some URLs to check out and I do the same.
I run into a bunch of old friends. Folks I haven't seen in forever who were all instrumental in my moving to San Francisco almost two years ago to the day. It is soo good to see how everyone is moving into their own. Lots of day jobs quit, lots of new ones started, lots of paths crossing and crazy funny synchronicities that give me a sense of the underlying order of it all. Derek Powazek is onstage, giving his first-person account of stepping up to personal publishing and the benefits it's awarded him.
I meet the fuckedcompany guy. He tells me he has his own web consulting company. His clients are virtually the only ones who are guaranteed to never get written up on fuckedco. Now _that_ is a market niche!!!
I head back to help man our booth. The segue into work mode is almost unnoticeable. I have a long conversation with a woman who's developing a project for infusing some fun and art and creativity into the whole south park dot com thing, and her ideas get me really excited. Non profits, people from smaller cable tv access channels come up to our booth and want to know more about how to implement our service. Someone else from an East Bay kid's organization stops by, and we come up with some really fun ideas for how to work with them.
A guy who was tapped into the wellspring of the life force itself is handing out flyers for adopt a redwood. He talks about the care and feeding of redwoods and there are a bunch out front for people to take home. "Plant it in the back corner of your yard," he says. "2000 years is a lot of landlords..." Redwoods, I learn, like lots of water. Low areas, ravines, and lots of compost.
It was such a great event and I guess the point of this missive is to note that Webzine has evolved beautifully and couldn't have come at a better time. It was so cool to see that the San Francisco spirit I fell in love with is still alive and well and despite (or perhaps because of) the dot com invasion. Shouts out to ryan, eddie, and the rest of the organizers for creating such an inspiring forum.
