Supernova 2005 has had a mixture of good, bad, and ugly so far. Good: the Long Tail panel from Monday; the games panel from Tuesday where Jane McGonigal, Raph Koster, and JC Herz stood out; and the Predictive Markets session on Monday. Bad: Tuesday was dull until the games panel–it didn’t feel new or worth staying awake for (Wednesday is shaping up better, though). Ugly: a butthead interrupting Janice from Adaptive Path with “I’m bored and you haven’t said anything new” and turning hostile from there. Given the discussion around SXSW, ETech, and other conferences, I had to wonder whether Chris Tolles would have been such a jerk to a male presenter or whether he’d simply have changed rooms to find something that was more interesting to him. Either way, he left an ugly memory in anotherwise great first day. Fortunately he’s the exception, not the norm, at the conference.
