photo: ryan junnell
i did get a chance to question san francisco mayor willie brown a bit. he read a proclimation affirming "internet independence" in san francisco and then was about to leave the stage. i asked him a bit about his own internet usage - i was curious whether his words came from a place of personal knowledge, or ready recognition of the booming business around him. eventually i wormed out of him that he does actually communicate with some grandchildren in new york "through the system" which was nice, especially as punctuated by his mimicing his single finger hunt-and-peck typing style. but later someone reminded me that i had not held willie brown to any answers to pending political questions - whether AT&T/TCI should be granted a cablemodem monopoly in the SFBay area. That was kind of an instictual notion of mine - the questions were in my head, but i felt that willie brown was not going to have useful answers, and i felt that he was doing a nice thing to come and act political and celebrate our event and to press him would not be polite. i guess i have not always been polite? so i'm either aging selling out or both. boy, selling out sure pays. willie brown said he liked my suit.

I tried to engage the audience by inviting people to come up on stage between the experts and share their own URLs or causes. That was pretty lively, and we got to see some great sites (listed above on this page).

The competance of these people who must have been putting this conference on for love along was astonishing. The conference went entirely smoothly, with interesting engaging panels and great guests and nice art and helpful volunteers. SRL decided to defy the wishes of the SOMARTS staff and blow off a jet engine in the parking lot and the whole affair was shut down before everyone had a chance to party webzine style. Technostate was there too.

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