I'm here at the Demo 2004 conference, getting ready for the "Blog Nation" panel this morning. I just noticed that the folks at Six Apart have set up a Demo weblog, which looks pretty cool. To help show off the power of understanding the conversations going on around a topic of interest, I put up a page at demo2004.technorati.com showing aggregated information around what people are saying about the Demo conference itself. As people comment on Demo or write about topics related to the conference, the page is updated in near-realtime; the median time from posting to live index is 7 minutes. It is going to be very interesting to watch the commentary come in throughout the day.

I've been giving a lot of thought to Tim Oren's succinct comments that links are a new kind of social gesture, too. I think that's the most succint way of describing the phenomenon that we're tracking at Technorati - behind every link, behind every post, behind every weblog is a person (sometimes more than one), and that person is making decisions on what to post and who to link to, and the linking process itself is not just a proxy for attention (as the Google guys understood) but it is a new form of social gesture - definitely something conversational, more public than email, more accountable than BBSes or Usenet News, more transparent than writing a letter to the editor. I'm still noodling over this, what the underlying metaphor is that we're discussing, more to come as I think this through further...