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Adobe has released a public beta of Adobe AIR for Linux.  What is AIR?  It stands for Adobe Integrated Runtime and allows an HTML/JavaScript environment for developers to make awesome applications that look great and run on Windows, Mac OS X, and now Linux.  The applications developed in AIR also have the same look and feel, adding to their cross-platforminess (yeah I just coined a new term).

I use Adobe AIR applications, including Twitter clients Snitter and Twhirl, Google Analytics, and a few others.

If you’re a linux user, check out AIR - you won’t regret it.

I deleted my Pownce account today.  I’m on twitter and jaiku, and a crapload of other sites.  I have forgotten about my Pownce account, except for the emails I get whenever someone in my pownce circle sends out a message.

I have become saturated with requests for my time and I just don’t have time to keep up to date on Pownce as well.  Plus, Pownce doesn’t really present much of a value proposition over Twitter.  Additionally Twitter is where most of my friends are.

Last night, my buddy Kevin and I attended Ignite Portland.  Ignite is a presentation event that has an innovative way of pitching an idea or message.  Presenters get 5 minutes and prepare 20 slides and get 15 seconds per slide.  The PowerPoint is set on a timer so if you don’t finish your slide, you lose out.

The topics range from how to pitch idea to a VC to unwilding (just look it up).   I have to say that the presenters were way more memorable than their messages.  Everyone did a fantastic job.

The event was held in downtown PDX at Weiden+Kennedy, just about the coolest facility we could have held this thing.  Great job to Josh, Raven, and Dawn - you guys were awesome.

It was great to meet some twitter peeps that I’ve met over the last few months including @verso and @ahockley.

Last weekend I enjoyed my first Gnomedex, a tech conference hosted by Chris and Ponzi Pirillo. Seattle was the backdrop for this fantastic conference. Chris asked for feedback via our blogs, so that’s the intent of this post along with generating some discussion.

Gnomedex is an interesting conference because it’s single track, meaning there’s one session per time period and everyone sees the same speaker at the same time. The audience is varied. There are bloggers, videocasters, podcasters, general tech enthusiasts and marketers.

With all that said, the sessions as a whole were very useful. I didn’t enjoy the first session hosted by Robert Steele. As I said on Twitter, I think mixing politics and tech is great, as long as the tech is tied to somehow. Mr. Steele had no focus in his talk and this became very apparent during the question/answer period. He dodged a few questions, in my opinion, because he didn’t have a decent answer.

The Calacanis talk at the end of Friday generated a lot of buzz on the internet and became a meme in the coverage on Gnomedex. It was so entertaining for me to be in the same room while Calacanis is speak, Winer is heckling him, and Scoble’s using twitter to comment on Calacanis subject matter. It was like being in the middle of a tomato fight. Fun stuff.

The following day, Cali Lewis and her husband Neal spoke about the rise of their video podcast. Even though it wasn’t popular, I enjoyed it. I am a fledgling pod/videocaster so it was fascinating for me to hear their story. Thank you to Cali/Neal and Chris for bringing them on stage.

I had some amazing hallway conversations. I met some great people including Andru Edwards and Britt Raybould. Also it was a joy to meet Scoble and Chris.

Also take a look at my flickr photoset.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.