The offending burgers.

Plaxo's Joseph Smarr and John McCrea deem the sliders Comcastic.

Here come the firetrucks!

Ladder at the ready!

Firemen converge on the culinary disaster.

And in that scenario, you're the woman. Wait! I know that sounds sexist, but ... you're being pursued. You're the one looking for commitment.

So far Kongregate has collected $9 million, in a combination of venture, angel, and "super angel" funds. Was Greer's not putting out for just anyone what attracted hard-to-get Jeff Bezos, then? (Photo by Joi Ito)

• Blogger Jeremiah Owyang took studious notes from yesterday's talks, replacing six hours of talk with ten minutes of nitty-gritty.
• Supernova has its own official notes, much longer than Jeremiah's.
• The Supernova Media Center links to a live audio feed of today's talks, as well as podcasts and vlogs of the con.
• Grab an IRC program (for Windows or OS X) and log onto the #supernova channel on irc.freenode.net. That's the backchannel for the conference, where technologist David Weinberger is holding court among the snarkers under the name "DavidJoho".

1. Get a real ISP for a sponsor. AT&T proved here that it can't handle the job.
2. Know how people will choke your network. At a gamer conference, if you're lucky, everyone will be on World of Warcraft — a bandwidth sipper that runs on dialup speeds. At a vlogging conference, the upload traffic will choke in minutes. And at Supernova, broadcasting through high-bandwidth virtual world Second Life invites constant hogging, both up and down.
3. Build a firewall. A last resort, but it kills Bittorrent use.
4. Hand out EVDO cards. Let everyone choke Sprint instead.

To be fair, Supernova's wifi earns points for having any working wifi at all. After the jump, see what they did right.

1. Split the network into several SSIDs. Segment the network so it doesn't get choked by multicast.
2. Warn attendees. Remind everyone at the conference — every few hours — to shut down Bittorrent, save the World Cup watching for the bar TV, and chill out on the iTunes streaming.
3. In an emergency, kick it up a notch. In the late morning, Supernova added two extra access points. Way to adapt!

If the conference jesters were encouraged to speak up, instead of letting yes-men and weak devil's advocates dominate Q&A sessions, would boring one-sided conference panels turn into real discussions?

Of course not. That's not how a conference gets speakers to come back, and we snarkers are too passive-aggressive to ask anyway. But this is what the class clowns should have asked the speakers at this week's Supernova conference.

• To Sun CEO Jon Schwartz: "The host just said he hopes you're at the company for a long time. How long will four to five thousand Sun employees be at the company? Until before or after lunch?"
• To AT&T exec Eric Shepcaro, who just said, "Our strongest asset is security" (honestly): "Eric, do you mean 'Security, except when the NSA wants to look at your data'? Is that how security fits into today's announcement that customer data belongs to you and the NSA?"
• To IBM exec Linda Sanford: "When you had this values discussion you talked about, did that involve whether you'd work with Nazi Germany again?"
• To Craigslist founder Craig Newmark: "How are the birds in your backyard doing? Cool. See you at Reverie tomorrow? Cool."

Eight years at eBay? Must have been just a Class B felony.

Craig stands and introduces himself, his site ("we're a flea market"), and his philosophy: give people what they want. (A ludicrous commie notion threatening the solid tech industry strategy, "give people something broken and charge them to fix it.")

Yep, two minutes in, Craig drops the "My day-job is customer service" schtick. Dude, Craig, we know already. (By the way, he's not quitting.)

The liveblog keeps going after the jump.

"Give people some power, and they respond to it very well. But sometimes, people are prone to mob rule.... You don't want to suffer from the tragedy of the commons."

Big problems for Craigslist:

• Spam
• Malicious political propaganda
• Illegal activity
• Journalists hug Craig a little too tight (he didn't say that but you know it's true)

Craig brings up his other talking point: The effect on classifieds-funded newspapers is not as important as the ways Craigslist is helping people.

He names Dan Gillmor, failed (or at least not too successful) citizen journalism organizer. Then he names .Jeff Jarvis, the New Media prophet who's supposed to launch his own citizen journo org soon. (Craig, by the way, might work with Jarvis. He doesn't mention this.)

Eep, Craig says "user generated content."

And now Craig's done. Time for a panel to join him to discuss "Power to the People." And it's always cute to hear this discussed by the people who always had power.

Hoo boy, Web 2.0 just got dropped, albeit with a clever disclaimer that CMP and O'Reilly Media own the term. Liveblogging (did he just predict convergence?) will continue after the jump.

Yep, Schwartz says that in a few years, you'll get the same stuff on your phone, your laptop, your brain-embedded HUD...

Supernova host Kevin Werbach asks Schwartz about his earlier statement, "All CEOs should blog." Schwartz points out that a few years ago, CEOs didn't read their own e-mail or have cell phones. Being a CEO is all about communicating, he says, and blogging is a new part of that.

Schwartz says he isn't the best-read blogger at Sun. But he understands why Bill Gates doesn't blog — it would undermine the importance of other Microsoft bloggers. (Whereas everyone knows that while Gates knows his technology cold, Schwartz can be safely ignored while everyone reads the engineers' blogs.)

Schwartz says eBay has more searches per day than Google. O RLY Jon? Can someone get numbers on this?

When Jon Schwartz says "unFATHomably large," he sounds a bit like Bill from "Kill Bill."

"I hope you have your job for a long time," says Werbach. Don't count on it, dude.

Everything, EVERYTHING, will be networked and connected and running on phones and computers and Blu-Ray and PUPPIES AND KITTENS OH JOY. And Sun will make money off of it all, until it gives the money-making platform away free and makes money fixing it when it breaks.

Aaaaand we're wrapped up. Next: Craig Newmark, the teddy-bear founder of Craigslist.

Credibility is like virginity.

Someday my six year old son hopes to grow up and scale across the enterprise.

My kids are going to go NUTS when I tell them I was at the Wharton Supernova Enterprise User Perspective workshop and I didn't take them!

"He used a Lego example and a Burger King example." "Oh, they beat us on Burger King?" "Yeah." "Then I should write a blog essay critiquing Burger King."

Tune in tomorrow, when Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz will share the insights that made Sun great. Later that day, he'll fire thousands of workers.

And now we have an altogether better reason to attend the Supernova 2006 conference in San Fran: Schwartz speaks there Thursday morning. Cocktails on Valleywag's dime for anyone who asks him (in public) whether he'll fire thousands of people before or after lunch.

Seriously. Double the cocktails if we get it on video.

Sun CEO will announce thousands of layoffs this Thursday [ZDNet]

MashPit III: Tuesday 10-5
Made by: "Pinko Marketing" evangelist Tara Hunt; designer Chris Messina; Technorati coder Tantek Celik
Gist: Coders make mashups of their favorite Internet tools
Attendance: About 22 people as of 11 AM, room for more
People to meet: Tantek Celik, Chief Technologist for blog-tracking startup Technorati and king of Microformats (meet him again at Supernova)
People to avoid: Kevin Burton, because he's not allowed to talk until he sells his startup.
Fringe benefit: Free Starbucks and pastries, unless you'd rather watch the live video feed.

Supernova 2006: Wednesday to Friday
Gist: Speakers like Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Technorati founder Dave Sifry, and Yahoo Senior VP Usama Fayyad speak about the business of technology. But you're here for the networking.
Attendance: Several hundred geeks and wonks hailing from Wired Magazine, Microsoft, Plaxo, and other places you want to get hired
People to meet: Kyle Brinkman, co-founder of MySpace, to ask if he's grown up and joined Facebook yet
People to avoid: The Ponytail (and Jon Schwartz, the interim Sun CEO attached to it)
Fringe benefit: Have fun drawing six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon maps connecting all the panelists — "So he's from Technorati, and she's on Technorati's board, but she also used to work for Sun, where this other guy works after leaving Microsoft...and these two are totally sleeping together."

Bloggercon IV: Thursday night to Saturday evening
Gist: Bloggers like RSS innovator Dave Winer and Gnomedex conference founder Chris Pirillo discuss blogging, how to make money from it, and how to win elections with it — things that bloggers currently suck at
Attendance: Capped at 125, with a long waiting list
People to meet: MAKE Magazine blogger Phil Torrone, man of many tech toys (jammers! robots! LEDs!)
People to avoid: Winer — which might be hard, since it's his conference
Fringe benefit: Winer declared the whole conference "on the record." Exploit this every time you overhear a whisper.

BarCamp: Friday to Sunday
Gist: Much bigger, funner version of MashPit — one of many BarCamp coding and collaboration events held around the world. Hosted by Microsoft, who really wants to prove how indie they are
Attendance: Room for 250, with 204 signed up so far
People to meet: Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera, if only to ask whether he and roommate Michael Arrington really have a "Tech-cave" and "Tech-mobile" in the basement
People to avoid: Anyone with a podcast microphone
Fringe benefit: Brag about getting invited to O'Reilly Media's Foo Camp, so "I just thought I'd drop by to see the little people."

Supernova 2006 [Official site]