I'm at my friend's house in the North Bay, taking a deep breath after 12 weeks of TechStars and working flat out, so I didn't make it to Gnomedex this year, but I wanted too.

This morning, looking at Josh Hallet's photostream from the kickoff, it strikes me that Gnomedex, like many good conferences and meet ups (including BlogHer), is a community, self-assembled and on the fly, but a community none the less.I'm psyched at the greater diversity of the conference attendees this year (totally due to Chris and Ponzi making sure that happened), and eager to watch more of the talks.

Vicarious thrills iz me today, drinking coffee and doing relaxing in the gray, cool North Bay, a great countweight to two days of driving highway to get back from Colorado. Ugh. Sigh. Coach potato face. Hello, my people,

(Tags to track are on twitter, flickr , friendfeed, and Google...presos are starting to go up at slide share. this is one of those proof cases for social media & remote access.Live feed here.)

So, it's over. My first Gnomedex talk, and the one where I chose to discuss identity, sex and relationships--not microformats.

The Look Back
How did it go?
Pretty well.
How did the audience react?
Quietly.

As one blogger said, there was no way the room full of (mostly) male geeks felt ready to share their own thoughts and feelings about such personal stories on the web--people in the audience seemed far more focused on the possibility that anything one exposed--under your own name--like smutty jokes from when you were 14--would live in Google's search results forever and make employers and investors made and ruin your reputation ( Pud, aka Phil Kaplan, amusingly refuted this one during the Q&A, thank you).
So once I got over the fact there wasn't going to be a big open discussion with everyone jumping right in (did I really think that?), it was all good--There's nothing like dancing on the edge of your comfort zone in public, right?
I made the points I wanted to make and shared what seemed appropriate--And my talk hopefull added some fresh thinking to the conference.

(Aside)
All afternoon, post session, people kept coming up to me and sharing comments and stories, so final cut would be that this topic was hard to talk about in public, but that many folks had much to say...just not in a group.

The Look Ahead
Blogher is coming up in a few weeks and I hope to have a similar discussion within Halley, Melissa and Susie's ROYO session (or somewhere)...Identity, persona, safety, voice are topics that continue to interest me, and exploring how they function as cornerstones for online personal expressions is a conversation I want to continue to have.

PS. Chris and Ponzi, this was a blast--thank you!