An exchange with Xeni Jardin

Xeni Jardin wrote to me after I wrote this (found below) about the amazing Live from the Blogosphere event which she co-produced, and said this:

For the record, we didn't know anything about the google news until Ev disclosed it on the panel by way of his laptop. Nobody at the event did, to the best of my knowledge.

If the event had been -- as you wonder aloud on your blog -- put together just as a pretext for Google and/or Pyra to make that
announcement, we'd have at least probably had a decent budget to work with. That would have been nice.

As it was, we scraped together a few bucks from our own pockets, then talked friends into begging/borrowing/stealing the equipment and services we needed to put it together.

This was the real deal, not a corporate press conference masquerading as editorial content.

To which, along with asking for permission to quote her, I replied thusly:

I believe you. I probably was unclear in the way I said what I did. The feeling I was trying to convey was that it was in so many ways the too-perfect setting and occasion for such an announcement - had your event not actually been underway, something of the sort would have had to be invented (like Voltaire's God). An uncanny thing.

By the way, that's a wonderful observation on authenticity - any "corporate" event would give itself away with tablecloths or decent chairs. heh