If a bomb hit this corner of a conference room, a tight core of people who populate and propel digital punditry would pass from the earth. And who would blog about it then?

I've landed at the Emerging Technology Conference. The morning speaker is Joe Trippi, Howard Dean's former internet campaign manager (Howard Rheingold LiveBlogged Trippi's speech on SmartMobs). I sat near him at breakfast and invited him to practice his talk on myself and Tim Oren. "I have no idea what I'm going to say," he said. I proposed that the audience here is predisposed to like him, for promoting democratic uses of the internet. They're politically uninformed, relatively, and technically and media aware. He took the bait - "Versus the press, who are technologically incompetant and..."

I proposed he build a bridge between those groups, those understandings, for his talk. He said, "No way, I'm going to blow it up." I also warned him that they'll be fact-checking in real-time. "Shit, you're kidding me." With a straight face. But he reads blogs - he was playing with me. It was fun to talk with him - his deadpan responses to my provocations egged me on.

Mom saw this entry and mentioned that Trippi had been married to a family friend. So I followed him into the bathroom and cornered him later on the issue. He somehow routed that conversation to be about the people taking charge of democracy, and asked for my card for a followup on the conference. Later, when he was leaving in a big hurry talking to four people carrying his luggage, I stood next to him with my camera. "You're driving me nuts!" he said. Then he smiled and said take care.