And now it can be told.

Uncharacteristically, being that I am naturally a shy person, I loved summer camp. And I have loved the summer camp-like events that I’ve participated in since. There’s something about taking a diverse melange of people who don’t know each other and throwing them in an isolated oasis for a time, doing stuff together: no matter who they are, and where they’re from, interesting stuff results. Soul-building stuff.

At Zap Your PRAM we had young techs and reborn veteran capitalists, radical librarians and radical academics, filmmakers and film enablers. And Buzz.

Many of these people never would have met without Zap as a forum. Some, like John Muir and Stephen Regoczei, have lived 4 blocks from each other for 10 years and worked for the same institution and didn’t meet until the conference brought them together.

Others, like Software User Robert and Software Developer Dave met in the real world for the first time after several years of sitting at opposite sides of a piece code.

So now John from Ontario is going to do radio with Dave from Harvard. And Ian and Tessa are turned on to PEI as film location. And Buzz and Stephen are going to work on ActiveWords together. And people from New York and Florida and Germany and Newfoundland and Windsor and Toronto. And Prince Edward Island. All know each other.

When I wrote the what is Zap your PRAM document back in August, I claimed that we didn’t really know what the conference was about. That was a lie. Zap Your PRAM wasn’t about blogs, or web browsers or provincial elections or image search solutions or death or libraries. It was a summer camp for people who, because of blogs and web browsers and provincial elections and image search solutions and death and libraries are part of what Stephen would call “the same tribe.”

When I wrote that we wanted Zap to be a conference for interesting, interested people, this is what I was really getting at. I didn’t mean “interesting” in any sort of universal way (although it appeared I did, for which I received from you’re-an-elitist flames); I meant interesting to each other.

I think it worked.

Jeff Pulver flys on jetBlue for the first time.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for David Neeleman (their CEO) to get back to me about having lunch.

From Tim Bray comes a pointer to How to read a modern Passenger Car Tire Sidewall.

I’ve always wondered two things about blogs and conferences: first, whether all those people with open laptop lids in the audience are actually listening or not, and, second, why official conference blogs always seem to dry right up as soon as the conference starts.

I’m still not sure on the first point. I wonder if there’s been a conference where the speaker has requested laptop lids shut? I mean, if two or three people in the audience were playing banjos, I would probably ask them to stop. Well, actually, I probably wouldn’t, because that would be pretty cool. But if they were frying eggs, or soldering copper pipe, or making a papier mache doll house, I would probably be distracted and annoyed enough to ask them to wait until I was done speaking.

Somehow, at least so far, the pitter patter of typing has been deemed enough like banjo playing and not enough like frying eggs so that it’s been allowed to fly under the annoyance radar.

Personally, I want to try to engage my audience, and that requires a sort of presence that isn’t possible if they’re all acting like court reporters on Law and Order. My personal spirit-guide on this is Lillian Ross, writer for The New Yorker, who writes, in her book Reporting Back:

I don’t use a tape recorder when I report. To me, the machine distorts the truth. It’s fast and easy, and a lazy way of eliciting talk, but a conversationalist is not necessarily a writer. Tape recorded interviews are not only misleading: they are unrealistic: they are lifeless. I don’t want a machine to do my listening for me. Literal reality rarely rings true. It is not interesting.

To me eye, transcribo-o-blogs are more tape recordorial than thoughtful, mostly because the art in a talk happens once my head explodes into the listener’s, and I don’t think the listener can properly process that explosion and report on it at the same time.

As to the “official blog dries up” situation, I’ve come to understand that: the conversational energy that lives inside a conference blog suddenly finds traction in the reality of the conference. In a sense, it’s like the [warning: Star Trek metaphor] conference has been “beaming in” for several months, and finally all the pattern buffers are aligned, and the physical form of the conference has appeared on the transporter platform, and you want to take it out to dinner, and give it a hug, and sing about it, rather than sitting back behind the machine and hiding behind it.

As Dan blogged yesterday, the Zap conference has been going very, very well. I feel like it’s a good party, with the right mix of people to create enough turbulent conversational energy to sail on through the weekend. When things wind down this afternoon, I think we’ll have reached the top of our game, which, said my old basketball coach Bill Difranceso, is the right time to pack up the ball for the time being, and start thinking about next week’s game.

Who would have thought that a bunch of my old friends, a bunch of librarians, a bunch of 20something technology gurus, and a straggle of people who accidentally wandered in could have so much in common?

Now you can get Matt Rainnie in stereo: listen and read.

This is the audio of a talk I gave at the 2003 Zap Your PRAM conference, in Cavendish, PEI. I spoke about my role in the 2003 Provincial General Election.

Dave Winer has pictures from That Other Conference. Rip-roaring good time, it looks like.  ;-)

Buzz left me a cryptic phone message earlier in the week in which he referred to “that other deal.” I had no idea what he was talking about. Turns out that, like The Scottish Play, it’s now considered unhealthy to utter The Other Conference’s name.

Lest anyone forced to attend over there, or anyone else involved, take any offense, let me iterate something which I hope should be obvious: my good-natured razzling of those trapped in the suburban hell of West Royalty listening to speakers talk about demographic profile development and interactive jelly bean promotional tie-ins is all in good fun. I hope you’re all having a good time on the Island; really.

My friend Leah, who I wrote about here earlier, has a blog! The most interesting writing, for me, is talented, well-spoken people who can write well, writing about the sometimes mundane, sometimes thrilling, sometimes workaday pace of their everyday lives. This is why I read Rob, Cynthia and Ian every day. And now a blog.

Thanks to Amazon.com’s amazing new “full keyword search of books” service, I stumbled across a reference to disease called Rukavina type familial amyloid p. Also called Indiana type, presumably becuase so many of our kin settled there, the disease is described as follows:

Indiana type familial amyloid polyneuropathy, a slowly progressive form of familial amyloid polyneuropathy with upper limb neuropathy in the distribution of the median nerves, leading to carpal tunnel syndrome and eventually trophic ulcers; ocular symptoms such as vitreous deposits may occur. Called also Rukavina type familial amyloid p., Maryland type familial amyloid p., and Rukavina’s syndrome.

What’s the chance that a syndrome that leads to carpal tunnel syndrome would be named after my family? Amazing. And decidedly unpleasant sounding. I’ll have to give someone in the Indiana branch of the family a call for practical details.

…thanks for the link from this story about the crazy and deluded software piracy study.