"Live from the Blogosphere" instant-replay

(1) Right in the middle of the panel discussion, Ev gets a call on his cellphone and announces live for the first time in public — in person, and by way of his blog — that Google bought Blogger (specifically, Pyra Labs, the makers of Blogger).
(2) Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap.
(3) Also for the first time publicly, during the panel discussion Ev and Noah Glass demo Audblog, a new service that allows you to "call in" a post to your weblog via mobile phone. Your speech, or the ambient sounds around you, are recorded and transmitted to your blog by way of your cellphone. Like magic, the demo is delightfully simple and actually works.

(4) A couple hundred or so geeks, writers, and webloggers from near and far show up, wearing "Hello My Blog's Name is:" stickers, and blogging throughout the event via hiptops and WiFi-enabled laptops. Lots of bloggers who'd only known each others' work online met each other in person for the first time. This is extremely cool, and really fun to witness. The crowd overflows out of the packed gallery, into Chung King Road; attendees outside who are standing too far away from the gallery doors to hear the panelists clearly just whip out their laptops and crank up the live Shoutcast audio stream. This is insane. And somehow, it works.
(5) Doc Searls, Heather Havrilesky, Mark Frauenfelder, Tony Pierce , Susannah Breslin, and Ev roll up their sleeves and deconstruct the blogosphere with the overflow crowd. They disagree on plenty, but agree that this is the year that weblogs will hit the mainstream. For-profit blogs and commercial blogging services start now. How this will transform what we know as egalitarian, anarchic, grassroots blogging culture — and mainstream media — remains to be seen. At the end of an historic day when millions of people worldwide took free speech to the streets, it seems particularly fitting to be exploring the power and impact of cheap, instant, easy online publishing.
(6) Somehow, SOCALWUG's wireless LAN, the audio stream, and the video stream all work. Archived streams of audio and video will be available soon, and I'll post links here as soon as they are.
(7) John Von Seggern from digitalcutuplounge.com delivers a smokin' Asian-fusion DJ set from laptops — and debuts a new mash-up we'll post here later this week.
(8) Everyone rolls down Chung King Road to a smoky, crusty, 61-year-old Chinatown dive bar for real-time streaming beer and live wireless conversation. Life is good.
Discuss