I spent almost 4 hours at the Geek Dinner last night in Manhattan, first at Grand Central Station (Two Boots Restaurant) and later at the The Benjamin Hotel on E. 50th Street.
My Sidekick 3 mobile phone has a camera - but it's not good with low light situations like the Two Boots Restaurant - hopefully some of the photos from last night taken by others will be posted and I can reference them here. Here's the single picture that was taken by my Sidekick 3 that's even worth posting.
And that's me in the foreground - but most of the action is not in the picture - I'll wait to see what others have posted on the event as there were at least 3 people taking pictures (with much better cameras than mine) besides me.
And I found one post about it already from Dave Wheeler.
Ok, so what can I say about last night's dinner - this was the second time I met B.L. Ochman, the first being about a year ago at SESNY06 - Blogger Lunch. B.L. is pretty good at this thing (social gatherings) and made everyone feel at ease, we had about 25 people who attended at some time during the evening.
I needed a glass of red wine to calm me and then I was OK, was holding myself back from saying too much, trying to let other people talk and glad that afterwards, I was not the focus of conversation. Hugh Macleod of the Gapingvoid was both raising up and dashing Patrice Evans of Gawker/ The Assimilated Negro, first, as a great writer in one sentence, and not so great one in the next. I really was glad I did not stay long enough for Hugh Macleod to focus in on me - in this case, his unfamiliarity with my writings was a plus.
I also had a nice conversation with Rick Bruner, who is a photographer and also works for DoubleClick; Rick seemed to me genuinely modest.
And Hugh Macleod.. well I really did not read his blog or look at the Cartoons he draws but the knew the name. OK, we had a long conversations last night, at the bar, about A List Bloggers - and GapingVoid being in the Technorati Top 100. With the "A List" word being used so freely….I tried to define it - at which point everyone disagreed with me. Boy…..am I glad that Hugh Macleod did not focus in on me…that would have been much different type of conversation. I felt so much better being a nondescript listener here.
I felt like I was hanging out with people a little different than the crowd I normally do - and I got the sense that B.L. Ochman has things (and people) she thinks are cool and "in" and others that are not cool, not in, not fun.
I did not want to be one of the uncool people so I tried not to say too much …… because clearly - if I talked too much about Web Analytics - I'd probably be "un-fun" last night…and last night was a "fun-night" hangout with Hugh Macleod on his first visit back to NYC in 7 years.
In fact, my Art Blog, www.ArtNewYorkCity.com, was the facet of myself that I talked more about last night as the people I hung with were much closer to Art than Metrics (being fun). So….. last night I decided to be the Artist and Art Writer more, and the Web Analyst, less.
I'll be happy to hear from anyone that I met at the party - whose email list I already got from Dave Wheeler - and whose names and blogs I tagged in this post; but here's Dave's post so I can include the names here as well:
"….BL Ochman organized a fabulous evening and, of course, our honored guest, Hugh MacLeod, for including us on his trip back to the city ! It was great to meet such interesting people and I hope there is another Geek Dinner / NYC very soon !
Others at the event (along with links to their websites) included…
Mitch Axelrod, Rick Bruner, Patrice Evans, Senia Maymin, Roger from melatonemusic, Alice Garik, Thomas Maloney, Marshall Sponder of www.webmetricsguru.com, www.artnewyorkcity.com, and www.smartmobs.com, Kelsey Kaufman, Josh Kaufman, and, of course, yours truly… Dave Wheeler."
And that's about it.
