by Chris Nolan, 05/19/05

At the beginning, when a tech-based idea starts to catch on, a kind of ad hoc clubhouse springs up. That's what Google was like when it was 50 engineers and the Grateful Dead's ex-chef squeezed into a rented office building off Highway 101. It's what Wired was like as the magazine opened and, almost immediately, became the spokes-place for all things -- and all people -- digital.

PDF's second conference was a little bit like that, too. And yes, it does sound a little un-democratic. There were the Democrats, of course; the Deaniacs (Nicco! Zephyr!) holding down a lunch table for a few hours before things really got going, drinking coffee and chatting. Wary of too many Democrats -- look, she works for The New York Post -- Andrea Peyser started culling conservatives and Republicans for an initial column idea. She found some, too: Slant Point's Scott Sala among them. Brian Reich produced podcasts of the event and did some interviews from a hallway table. In short, the usual suspects were in the house. Only the house, for once, was in New York, not California.

That, of course, means more media attention. In California, where I live, the local newspapers are so over-tech, they regard its zealous adherents as local characters. Kind of the way New Yorkers treat a Donald Trump-ism: "There he goes again," they think. Here, it's a novelty. The blog "reporters" from CNN were culling ideas. Jeff Jarvis was running off to do The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer - that's after his sidebar stand-ups in the conference halls. I got to do WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show and, sigh, at least one "reporter" was running around asking how "bloggers" could be respectable if they weren't edited. That's not the only cultural gap awkwardly bridged: When Peyser realized that the open laptops in the main auditorium weren't being used by folks taking notes, but people adding to the chat being projected behind main hall panelists, she had only one reaction: "Now, I'm really scared," she said.

Scary but amusing, that's for sure. And very handy for deflating onstage pronouncements. As a moderate who had to face the chat screen, Markos Moulitsas, Josh Marshall and Hugh Hewitt, let me tell you there are few things more frightening than the chat. I got off easy; folks didn't start cracking wise until Markos Moulitsas started holding forth. The audience was roaring with laughter when someone responded to Kos with the chat post, "Bullshit!" Later, he told PDF executive editor Micah Sifry that he loved the backchat and kept looking up behind him to see what was being said. "And you know, whoever wrote that was right," he told Sifry. "It was bullshit."

It got worse. During the final plenary on the future of political media, columnist Arianna Huffington was momentarily flummoxed when an inadvertent slip of the tongue got the audience going. Offering new technology to old media traditionalists, she said, was a little bit like "giving sex to children...they don't know what to do with it."

Within seconds, an audience-storm of comments started, highlighted by someone's joke that Arianna's quote was already up on The Drudge Report. She quickly recovered and was soon happily keeping up with both conversations--the one among her fellow panelists and the one being created by the audience--when Sifry handed her his PowerBook. Afterwards, she said she had meant to say, "exposing children to sex," not giving them sex.