The (old) Alpha Mind

On this blog last night, listing the best presenters at BBS, I forgot Mary Hodder. I forgot because I was using the original speakers list to jog my memory. (Justly afraid I was of pulling out my actual notes–I’d never have gotten to bed.) Mary wasn’t on that list. She was called in last-minute to fill in for another speaker, and gave the kind of straight-on, cover-the-subject talk I appreciated from Rebecca Blood.

It’ll take me a couple of days more to finish evaluating BBS. What I can say before signing off for the night is that Rebecca Blood did a fine presentation. And for the sake of the whole conference, it was a shame she went last, because she made it so obvious how far most of the other presentations had been off the mark. She was on topic, she made every word count, she kept to her allotted time, she simply did what I wished every other speaker had done. If you follow the link to her site, you’ll even see she immediately posted a link that several people had asked for during her pres. Superb, a true pro.

She wan’t the only one who did us right. Sally Falkow was spot-on, too. John Cass and Laurie Mayers also delivered.

And Buzz Bruggeman was great, shamelessly hawking his product at every turn, and doing so in such a way as to show how it’s done–with charm, humor, and above all, great storytelling. One of the ways he gets you not to be turned off by his salesmanship is the beams of positive light he sheds on others, many others. For example, he did a good job of plugging his friend David Allen.

Three pictures from BBS:

Chris Pirillo and Jessica from Tennessee

Buzz Bruggeman, Sean Lyndersay, Scoble

Scoble, Steve Gillmor

End of day 2 of the Blog Business Summit in San Francisco. I’ll blog about it in more detail later. But some quick comments:

The day started slow and became more exciting as it went along. Evelyn Rodriguez started us off by explaining the blogosphere by the metaphore of the marketplace. Not a new metaphor, but a good exposition of it, and anyone who quotes both Donne and Yeats in a 15-min presentation is cool in my book.

Scoble has plenty to say, a good thing considering how much he blogs. Details on what he said today will come either tomorrow night on this blog or in audio later in the weekend. The last session of the day he spoke about defensive strategies for companies that blog, and it was a good presentation with lively audience interaction.

After the sessions, I had a great talk with Shel Israel and Steve Gillmor. A trio of children of the 60s we are, and we shared war stories about an old and very ugly war (Nam, which all of us opposed and in which one of us lost a brother). The three of us standing together drew rather more good-natured ageist comments from others than we really needed.

We talked about our shared admiration for Dave Winer. Then one of us, Shel or I made a comment (I honestly can’t remember who, or the content) about Dave that was, gee, not even negative, but which sort of qualified our admiration. Gillmor went to Dave’s defense like a bulldog.

I was meeting all of these luminaries in person for the first time. It was great. By coincidence, I’ll be meeting Winer for the first time on Saturday, at the OPML Roadshow in Berkeley. What an influential bunch of characters to meet in three days.

Lest I forget, I need to thank my friend and sometime business partner Glen Allmendinger of Harbor Research for his offer to foot the bill for my conference registration. I accepted his offer, of course. What a great gift!