I return from a wild and wonderful week of conference mania, and I am more or less stunned from the experience. Not so much the late nights, the travel, and the shock to the system that conferences can be, but the impact of people's writing. Plato said that writing is the geometry of the soul, and I have triangulated myself into the souls of a long list of amazing people, now in my growing inner circle. I feel enlarged and exhilarated by exposure to their thoughts and insights.

First, I attended the Blog Business Summit, where I met a lot of new friends, like Chris Pirillo, Jon Husband, Evelyn Rodriguez, Jennifer Rice, and Biz Stone, as well as rubbing elbows with old buddies like Halley Suitt, Greg Narain, Alex Williams, Robert Scoble, and dozens of others. The BBS was a big success and the True Voice session with Robert Scoble and Greg Narain on "the business of blogging" had fifty or more people in attendence (I posted it on Friday). Halley and I had a lot of fun doing a joint session, True Voice: The Art and Science of Blog Writing. There is audio from the presentation that I will get from Steve Brobeck and company laetr this week, I hope. I will post the presos at the same time.

I swooped down to Napa (after spending a wonderful evening with Ted and Molly Rheingold in SF) for the New Communications Forum conference. More time with Evelyn Rodriguez, who also attended, as well as first exposure to Andy Lark, who is a force of nature packaged in human form. Other notable people and events at NCF: the wonderful panelists for the True Voice session, there, including Torsten Jacobi of Creative Weblogging, Julie Woods of Cymphony, Fergus Burns of Nooked, Michael Sippey of SixApart, and Mike Lombardo of Newsgator. I plan to post that session later today, after editing it.

It will take me weeks to assimilate all the interactions and potential for collaboration -- yes, I did manage to snag a bunch of Corante contributors on this tour. Much, much more to follow.