It’s that time again everyone. It is time to invade the Emerald City and for all of the invaders to “get their Gnome on”! I am jumping on the train tomorrow morning and will be meeting up with the gang once I hit the Seattle city limits.

This year looks as if it will yield a great line up of speakers. Some notable names in my world include: Senator John Edwards, Blake Ross, Dave Winer, Steve Gillmor, Steve Rubel, Susan Mernit and many others that I will avoid listing in order to keep this semi-short.

The food, the networking opportunities (and believe me, it’s amazing) and even the fun Gnomedex song for this year will definitely help to make for a summer that I will not soon forget.

But you know, it’s going to be tough to beat last year’s event. I had a chance to hangout with Hipcast’s Eric Rice, Leopard Programing’s Brandon Watts, Lockergnome’s Editor-in-Chief Robert Glen Fogarty, Super-Blogger Greg Hughes and a number of others. We laughed, we blogged. We walked, and then blogged some more. Needless to say that there was more merriment going on than you could shake a stick at!

This year, much like last year, we are going to have some great giveaways to look forward to. Swag is always in plentiful supply and I do believe that we are going to see some pretty sweet contests in addition to this.

The two biggies that I am aware of include Gnomedex’s Xbox giveaway and WeatherBug’s weather station giveaway contest. Folks, these are some really cool hardware prizes! Seriously, I’ve seen both in action and some lucky people are going to make out like bandits, let me tell ya! We already know that the Xbox is a must have and a pro-level weather station with a value of thousands of dollars is enough to get any hardware geek interested in learning the basics of weather forecasting. Yup, hardware like this combined with a virtual army of backyard bloggers provides for a fast growing community environment.

Well folks, I have a TON to do before tomorrow and not a whole heck of a lot of time to work with. For those of you who are able to make it, just look wander around a bit, you’ll find me. My name tag will read Matt Hartley of MattHartley.com