William Smith, a guy who I don’t know and who I hope to one day have a drink or coffee with, blogged about Gnomedex and was critical of Cali.
He said,
Some other notable blunders included Geek Brief TV which was unwatchable (in fact, as unwatchable as the podcast that they put out on itunes). I seriously walked away from their presentation thinking that Cali Lewis (which isn’t even her real name) is just basically faking her interest in tech so she can have a cooshy job working at home.
In defense of the girl I love and the show that is “watchable” by hundreds of thousands of viewers, I blogged…
We spoke at Gnomedex 7.0. One guy said he walked out on our speech because he thought Cali was pretending to be interested in tech so she could get a cushy job working at home. That guy is an idiot. The sixteen+ hours Cali works a day on building the Geek Brief brand is nothing related to cushiness. Anyone who thinks someone can pretend an interest in tech and be successful is a dork because tech is boring, if you don’t love it.
Cali responded to William through comments on his blog, and now, I think they’re friends.
Chris Pirillo (uh…I think I have a man crush on him), quoted that paragraph and apologized to me saying…
*sigh* I’m sorry, Neal - I really am. Sometimes those of us who have been doing it for years often forget that people have to start somewhere - and that everybody takes a different path to find success.
William, our critic commented on Chris’s post saying,
I am not sure what there is to be sorry about Chris. You apologize to Neal because there were people who thought their presentation came off phony. I happen to be the “idiot” that he blogged about. I’d post on his own site but of course, he locked his own comments down. At least Cali earned my respect by engaging in discourse on my site and not running from criticism. Kudos to her.
I have to apologize to William for calling him an idiot. He said Cali is pretending to be interested in technology so she can have a cushy job working at home. I know and love the girl and she is obsessed with technology. If we’re out to eat, she’s checking her feed reader. I try to get her to unplug, and all the while, I know it’s not going to happen.
William’s analysis of Cali/Luria was so far from reality that calling him an idiot made sense at the time. I also echo William’s response to Chris…no need to apologize, dude. I was just defending my wife.
Funny story that’s very apropos to Gnomedex 2007…I’m new to blogging. I may have 20 posts. I asked Cali to turn off my comments after reading a post by Jason Calacanis, where he praised Dave Winer for suggesting that comments on blogs are not useful. That made a lot of sense after a few glasses of Gin. But then…
I forgot that my comments were turned off and just assumed nobody reads my blog. 
So, to William Smith…I hope we can someday have a drink, or at least coffee. To Chris Pirillo…you are a virtual mentor. And to anyone who attended Gnomedex, we had as much fun or more than you guys seemed to be having when we spoke.
We’re all about making the audience laugh and the auditory feedback we got justified our mission. We stepped off the stage happy and that hasn’t changed at all.
A few bloggers wrote that we seemed nervous or un-prepaired. We didn’t respond to those critics because the criticism was valid and helpful. We’re confident we’ll be great speakers soon. We’re not expecting to be Kawasaki on our first run.
(Oh, and Cali Lewis, I’m hoping you get a Google alert on this post so you can turn comments back on…maybe Winer is wrong.)
http://www.nealcampbell.com/2007/08/15/blogger-elitism/
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