Of the 10-12 people there, three of the group’s mainstays had just returned from Drupalcon — the big Drupal developer’s conference in Barcelona.

As they ran down the list of the cool stuff they saw, they mentioned the new Flex Showcase that Adobe revealed at the conference — built on top of Drupal with Flex as the presentation layer.

Folks brought it up on their laptops and seems genuinely impressed — A few piped up with the question, “This is cool but what is Flex?”

And that’s the point in the evening when I saw Adobe’s strategy of engaging this particular developer community begin to pay dividends.

I chimed in and gave a summary of Flex — that it’s a developer friendly way to build Flash applications — to which many of the folks said, “Ahhh, that’s why I haven’t heard of it, Flash, it’s closed source, right?”

I got to detail that while the Flash Player is not open source, the Flex framework is and that there is a free SDK that can be used to build Flex apps. Also mentioned the Tamarin project and how the high performance Javascript engine from Flash had been open sourced and would provide the Javascript functionality for the next version of Firefox.

The picture this particular Drupal community got is that not only does Adobe share some of their ‘open’ ethos — it’s also actively making it easier to do cool stuff (like the Flex Showcase) in their native environments (text editors, not timelines).

And with that, Flex made an inroad into one of the most vibrant developer networks I’ve gotten to know over the last couple of years.

Drupal has a great community of folks like this around the Northwest — and it was cool to see Adobe turn a corner with them, not through marketing ’schlock’ or shilling for ’boutique’ sites, but through honoring diverse business models and solving people’s dev problems.

This is the same kind of strength that Microsoft’s Silverlight plays to in the ginormous .NET developer community. With the CLR coming in Silverlight 1.1, Microsoft is tapping into the shared ethos and “how can you solve my problem” of theis massive developer group that will likely make or break its Silverlight play.

No matter who you think wears the black hats or the white hats in this discussion, RIA developers everywhere would rather spend their time building cool and robust tools for their users than fighting cross browser CSS rendering and multiple javascript runtimes.

What a blast.

It’s great to see something that started as a grassroots geek gathering in Seattle begin to flow out to national conferences like this. And, I’m working in a new role — slide producer instead of video.

The folks and sessions here at MAX are amazing — some highlights so far –

1. Brazillian BBQ with guys from Aviary and hearing about the online app suite that seems like it will be the gateway toolset for the Threadless generation.

2. Meeting someone from Microsoft’s developer tools team who is here to learn what Adobe is doing well in the developer space. Seemed genuinely interested and I continue to think that this ongoing listening that both Adobe and Microsoft seem to be doing with one another is good for the Rich Internet Application industry as a whole.

3. Laughing out loud with John Wilker at the keynote today as Kevin Lynch mentioned he wanted to show a pretty cool site he’d come across that is using Flash video. He then brings up this site promoting Microsoft’s Halo 3 — a tongue in cheek dig at Microsoft not dogfooding it’s own Silverlight multimedia plugin on its high profile sites.

(thanks to flickr user prayyanks for use of this photo)

http://youtube.com/ignitenight

Have to say that this is the best batch we’ve ever done.

The content and presentations were fantastic. Vibe in the room was magic — lots of interesting conversations and cross-pollinations. I think we nailed the audio and video better than ever.

Also, the audience voted via text message to send the top talks to present at Gnomedex a couple of days later, where they got some of the best reviews of any of the presenters featured at the conference (not bad when Guy Kawasaki is presenting on the same stage you are ;)

Here’s one from Scotto Moore on internet art called “Make Art, Not Content” (other standouts are linked below that) –

Other stellar ones are –

Brian Dorsey - The Story of Noonhat
(Brian’s Noonhat project recently got picked up by KING5 TV here in Seattle and by the Seattle Times — Very exciting to see how Ignite helps bring wide exposure to a cool grassroots project like this)

Dave McClure - Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR!

Rob Gruhl - How to Buy a Car without Getting Screwed

Elan Lee - LIFE: If you’re bored, you’re doing it wrong

Like last night.

I was driving back to my hotel in Palo Alto from the Web 2.0 Expo at San Francisco’s Moscone Center West. I turned on the alternative station and heard Loveline come on with Dr. Drew.

I could tell something was different as they started the show — there was a quick note that they had rescheduled the guests for the evening (two porn actresses) and were going to take calls about the Virginia Tech shooting.

What ‘Virginia Tech Shooting?’ I asked myself.

I listened for a few minutes. Not much info. I scanned the FM stations. Nothing there but entertainment. I switched to AM and moved from news site to news site, picking up details.

What a sad moment.

This AM as I listened to CNN while getting ready to head back to the conference, I heard an account from a professor in the building where most of the murders occurred.

He described hearing gunshots and barricading himself into his office. He detailed how he went to watch video on CNN’s web site to get an idea of what was happening around him.

And I am at one of the biggest tech conferences to ever focus on how we, as an industry, create things like streaming media tools, etc. — and how they might be used.

I honestly never imagined that one — streaming video to monitor a massacre in your immediate proximity.

Stranger still is the fact that, after the Dot Com Crash, I worked at Real Networks for a year — monitoring the live performance of those CNN feeds — rallying the troops when surges brought things to a halt — triaging the system when it all went to hell.

I was the guy who woke up the Real news chief when the space shuttle broke up on re-entry in 2003. The team I was on monitored the video readiness as the U.S. prepared to invade Iraq and the fall(?) of Bagdad.

Sigh — may you live in interesting times is both a blessing and a curse.

• Monday 9:00 - The People Formerly Known as the Audience - Derek Powazek, Heather Champ
• Monday 10:10 -Rich Internet Applications with Apollo - Mike Chambers (Adobe)
• Monday 11:15 - Open Source Business Models for Web 2.0 - John Roberts (SugarCRM), Mårten Mickos (MySQL AB)
• Monday 1:30 - Venture Capital 2.0: Bright Future or Broken Forever? - Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), Jeff Clavier, (SoftTech), Michael Eisenberg (Benchmark Capital) David Hornik (August Capital), Josh Kopelman (First Round Capital), Chris Moore (Redpoint Ventures)
• Monday 2:45 - Keynotes with Tim O’Reilly, Jeff Bezos, Mena Trott, Joe Kraus, John Battelle, Jay Adelson, Kevin Lynch, David Knight, Jay Bhatti, and Kerry Fleming
• Monday 5:30 - Expo Hall Booth Crawl
• Monday 8:30 PM - Birds of a Feather Sessions (BoFs) - Measuring the Business Value of Rich Internet Applications - Andre Charland (Nitobi), Ryan Stewart (ZDNet)

He really helped me get my head around some of the foundations of designing these next generation online social experiences.

Highlights quotes were:

• “Social apps is the world that IM has made”
• “I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections”
• “I give up personal productivity for network productivity. I sacrifice for the group.”
• “Fashionista recommendation is a different UI than a feature lookup (size, color, etc)”
• “What happens when the money gets serious? Well, what happened to the blogs? TechCrunch is no longer a blog per-se, it is a media property.”
• “Reputation is fragile both online and offline. Squander your rep and CBS may fire you.”
• “I often play psychologist for social apps. I set them on the couch and ask about their childhood.”
• “Find people who tag items the same way you do and you will find a social group based on shared ways of thinking and speaking.”
• “To understand social apps, you have to be in the flow, not outside. You can’t get it unless you are using them and you can’t explain it to people — you’ve got to do it. You can’t learn Karate by thinking about it”

Took notes in MindManger — here’s the .PDF or the .MMAP files.

If you are here for the conference, shoot me a note or twitter me (bryanzug) and let’s hang out.

Am looking forward to Stowe Boyd’s 3 hour workshop this AM on ‘Building Social Applications‘. I hear he know his $#!7.

Also — the first Ignite session outside of Seattle is happening tonight at the Expo. Brady has put together an excellent lineup — including Justin.tv — should be interesting.

Over the last few months I’ve found myself trying to explain the deepening (and real community) aspects of meatspace interactions that my wife Jen and I have been drawn into as a result of participating in online community.

Usually we are trying to explain to business colleagues or friends or family or members of our church that, yes, indeed — online community is a part of real community and not the equivalent of social cheese-whiz that some describe it to be.

But, yeah — as I’m working to explain it I often see eyes begin to glaze over — and I can tell that folks are either not buying it or I’m not communicating very well.

Which leaves me — searching for ways to compellingly relate how online community has become real community for us — looking for the stories and patterns that engage both the emotion and the intellect.

Enter Kathy Sierra.

This morning I read her post from yesterday describing her keynote at SXSW. The post is called Face-to-Face Trumps Twitter, Blogs, Podcasts, Video… and is full of great passages on how all this social web software drives a deeper desire for face-to-face community.

My favorite quote –

…all our globally-connecting-social-networking tools are making face-to-face more, not less desirable. Thanks to the tools y’all are building, we now have more far-flung friends–including people we’ve never met f2f–than ever before. We now have more people we want to connect with in the human world, often after years of electronic-only contact.

Nice insight — sticking that pattern in my bag of tricks — something tells me the “online community isn’t real community, is it?” questions aren’t gonna stop anytime soon — this stuff is continuing to disrupt everything.

Did I mention that my mom who just got her first computer for Christmas is now IM’ing all the time — the world really is getting flat.

Click To Play

I’d call it a snapshot of this grand moment we are experiencing in the Seattle geek entrepreneurial community. Lots of fun from my end to help the momentum along.

Where to start? So many highlights — you can see all 25 of the five minute sessions over on the Ignite Seattle Blip.tv page. One’s that stood out were –

• Scott Ruthfield (embedded above) from Amazon talked about doing re-design in a “Megacorp”. Scott was at our Mind Camp 3.0 Discovery Slam and is a great presence on stage — very funny and engaging. Blip.tv video is here.
• Brian Aker was great as he told the story of ripping up his new house to install his own computer based phone system — it’s as much a tutorial as it is an essays on geek relationships with your wife. Very funny. Blip.tv video is here.
• Scott Berkun did a session on ideas and innovation and, as always, did a great job. Very cool visuals. Blip.tv video is here.

So many others were great — go take a look at the other sessions when you get a chance.