My 5 minutes of fame

Well, I guess my 5 minutes has come and gone ;-).
I have been paying extra attention to twitter this week – really trying to figure out if its useful or just another distraction.  Popular opinion seems to be that you have to follow a significant number of people (>100) to approach usefulness, so I have been trying to add to my follow list.  One way I decided to do this was add bloggers and podcasters I read/listen to to my twitter follow list.
One guy I have been following since my first podcast is Steve Gillmor.  I can remember the exact Daily Sourcecode in which Adam recommended Steve’s show (at that time called the Gillmor gang).  I was hooked and have been ever since.  The combination of content and theater was hard to find anywhere else.  The show / conversation has evolved over time and took a year long (or so) hiatus until Steve decided to re-start the conversation on Facebook last fall as the News Gang.  I immediately signed up to the group and have been listening to each episode, and yes some are better that others.
Late this afternoon I was watching tweets go by and noticed that the NewsGang twitterfeed had an item saying that the gang would be having a live feed from the show and to message for the dial in and passcode.  After a little troubleshooting of how the twitter messaging system, I got the dial in and passcode.  An hour later I was in my car and on the way home and I dialed in to listen to the show live.   After about 10 minutes I had to remind myself that it wasn’t the podcast.
The about 30 minutes in, Steve decided to open up the lines to the 3 lurkers that had dialed in to listen live.  I announced myself and the rest you should be able to hear sometime soon on the facebook group (I know Steve wants to keep the feedback mechanism of the group in place, so I won’t link to the episode directly…beside links are dead).
A great conversation to be part of…my only regret is that the topic was purely political.  I always do enjoy the political discussion the gang has, but I have been dying to ask them a few questions about how all the really interesting stuff we see happening in the Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 space will work it’s way in to manufacturing companies and the physical (vs. virtual) products we all buy.  Kind of a from bits to atoms discussion…oh well, maybe for my next 5 minutes.

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