Steve Rubel is right-on IMO.  This picture of Dean Hachomovitch's sneaker from the AP sums up the news at Gnomedex for me. Dean is General Manager of Microsoft's Longhorn Browsing and RSS technologies team, a long-time co-worker of my wife (who was on the Longhorn team before leaving for a startup called our son).  If you have no idea what I'm talking about, Alex Barnett offers a good roundup.

For me, the lessons at Gnomedex can be boiled down to the three "C"s of "Communication, Collaboration, and Compromise".  When folks like Dave Winer, Lawrence Lessig, and frankly many people at Microsoft including Dean's team see the greater good that can come from opening lines of communication, collaborating  and acknowledging up-front that certain, smaller compromises will have to be made in order to achieve the greater good, stellar things can happen.  A lot of people were afraid to take the risk. I would argue it's been a smashing success. What's even better, updates are already happening to the proposed extensions released under the Creative Commons license- based on feedback from those at the event.

And Adam Curry can be both an engaging and inspirational speaker when he wants to be.  He's been studying Steve Jobs by his own admission. 

To my family - don't worry- you don't need to know what this means right now other than that it's going to make you more productive in your daily life. More to come at the PDC which is gearing up to be a really good show this year.