Chris Pirillo is looking for names to add to the pictures he took last night at the Seattle Blogger Meetup so I added Jowl’s and mine (I think he got a picture of the back of my head also in the upper part of the picture [not shown], if I correctly identified all that gray). To other Seattle blogger attendees feel free to take this picture and add your name where applicable.

So in November 2004 at my first Seattle Blogger Meetup I had the exciting opportunity to sit next to and talk with Dave Winer then in December my son and I sat next to and talked to the one and only Robert Scoble and last night for the January 2005 Seattle Meetup I talked with the coding dynamo Jeff Barr from Amazon and the most excellent Syndic8 and last but certainly not least the Lockergnome himsef, Chris Pirillo. BTW, Jeff is currently blogging the Amazon DevCon. It’s like every blogger meetup I’ve gone to is filled with compelling bloggers and web celebrities!

What continues to surprise me, though last night was probably the largest attended one I’ve been to yet [list of attendees], is that there isn’t even more people showing up to these events. Some of these people you see speaking at conventions that you’d pay hundreds (or thousands) of dollars to see and that’s all you’ll likely ever do: see them at a distance. Here at the blogger meetup they are approachable and you can sit down face to face and chat with them about what they do, what they’ve done and what they want to be doing in the future.

Last night I also chatted with Jake Ludington who was kind of quiet sitting next to Chris. Besides Jake’s blog which has some great tutorials on it for Windows Media Player related stuff (we’ve pointed a few people to his tutorial on podcasting with Windows Media Player), he does the production for The Chris Pirillo show and they talked about doing some podcasting, but I don’t know if they ever captured any audio or not. There’s always next time. I gave them some constructive feedback on their show which I’m not entirely sure how it was received, but I hope it was received constructively anyway. I like the show and the content, especially the smaller bits. One thing I think they could improve upon is the length. Three hours for a podcast is an eternity, but even a live streaming show it’s tough to make that work. The web doesn’t have the traditional radio attention span unfortunately, or so has been the case in my learning experience with web radio since we started broadcasting in May of 2000.

Recently we split our two hours of tech radio show into two one hour shows with the first hour focusing on adult webmasters and the second hour focusing on mainstream/family audience (via Webmaster Cookbook). Tomorrow, Friday at 2pm PST / 5pm EST will be our 223rd live show and we’ll be featuring music from independent artist, Temple 8 in week two of our 2005 Battle of the Indie Bands. There will be giveaways as well from Temple 8 including CDs and 18×24 posters of the band. Might want to scratch that one out on the calendar.

Some people last night asked me if I was running a live webcam of the event with my Aiptek DV3100, but no, I wasn’t streaming any live video. If I were to do that we’d need more light because Ralph’s grocery was a bit too dark, but there is talk of a new venue to accomodate more people, so maybe the newer venue will have more light and better facillitate. We would be interested in doing some live casting from the event. This way maybe some others that couldn’t make it out could partake. I’m going to be ordering the Verizon Wireless card so I can have wireless broadband internet on the go and then I should literally be able to broadcast from anywhere … or at least that’s the plan anyway. I’d love to take some of the shows on the road anyway.

I had my M1400 Tablet PC out and numerous people stopped by to check it out including Karen Anderson who works for Apple. We talked a bit about the new iPod Shuffle and the niche market that the Tablet PC fits into. I asked her if Apple was going to come out with a Tablet and she said they never let her department near the hardware people, but that she was going to get an iPod Shuffle and also that the filesize for the music when compressed for the shuffle is smaller. This might be handy info for Shufflers (is that the right term?). We talked a bit about the Mac Mini as well.

I spoke to other folks too, but this entry is becoming a bit long-winded so I’ll save those other conversations for another time. About halfway into the event I got out of my chair and circulated the room introducing myself. I think it’s important for new attendees to do that and I still very much consider myself a new attendee. I wonder how many of these I’ll go to before I am considered a regular? I’m starting to recognize a few of the regulars like Chas Redmond, Jack William Bell, Jon and of course Anita (who stayed home tonight). Jake was feeling under the weather and didn’t want to make anybody sick so he also stayed home tonight, so Jowl didn’t get into any Nintendo DS matches. Tyd from thenyoudiscover.com took some cool B&W pictures of the event.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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