The Blogo’Shawn

I show two interesting events for the upcoming Saturday so I will be roaming the Peninsula in search of great people & ideas:

BarCampStanford - This event is part of the larger BarCamp Earth campaign with simultaneous BarCamps across the world, so you too can share in the concentrated brain waves sweeping the planet. Most of all, it’s a reason to get smart folk assembled at Stanford University for a pow-wow. I’ll be in attendance on Saturday. If you too intend to come, do sign-up and be accounted for.

Also Saturday, Women 2.0 and Meetro host a poolside party mixer. Since this is just the sort of thing I’ve been yearning for since the BlogHer conference, I figure I should check it out if I get out of BarCamp in time. After all, I now associate pool + sun + food/drink + majority of women with a great mixer occasion.

And speaking of women in tech. Yesterday, I attended an SFWOW function. SFWOW, which stands for “San Francisco Women on the Web”, is an organization I participated in when I first landed in San Francisco. Unfortunately that was when the new economy was slumping in 2001, so I caught the tail-end of the glory days and went to an SFWOW mixer or two. Since then, SFWOW has been largely a useful mail list and F2F events less seldom. Last night, I did mix and mingle though and got the sense that revitalization is underway with more upcoming events in the pipeline. So I’m going to help out by proclaiming the advance word better via the events channels I’ve grown fond of using. Like I said, I was so infused by the BlogHer spirit that I want to see more mixers oriented towards women in tech and women professionals who will speak about their experiences.

And thus the next meeting of SFWOW tech women will be coming up soon at 6PM on Tuesday, September 5th, in the Finiancial District of San Francisco with a panel focus on email marketing tips and tricks. The venue, London Wine Bar, is one I know very well and recommend enthusiastically since I have utilized it many times over for my own nefarious event purposes. It’s a great place to drink, mingle, and carry on conversation without competing noise, and the wines are terribly nice as well! I posted it as an Upcoming event so chime in there if you’ll be coming.

As an aside, let me state that I am seven days deep into the rather extreme Master Cleanse Lemonade Diet, or my special variation which still allows small quantities of wine and coffee for sanity’s sake. So put aromatic food in my immediate vicinity and I’m likely to bite someone’s head off. I don’t normally try this sort of drastic food restriction thing, but it seemed like an interesting experiment to undertake and so far, yes, my waistline has shrunk. Already I have foregone dinners and some food gatherings in this week but, naturally, this is shaping up to be a BBQ-centric, food and drink kind of weekend. I’m supposed to end this diet some time between Monday and Wednesday, though temptation beckons from every side! I must hold fast, yes.

Did I already vow not to focus on tech mixers in the Bay Area?  Well scratch that!  I can’t avoid them, and they seem to pepper my weekly schedule with surprising frequency!  Simply put, there have been a preponderance of mixers and doings to attend in these last weeks, enough to the point that my response to the introductory challenge of “what I do” is starting to trip gaily off my tongue without much effort.

 Well last week was splendid.  It brought another STIRR mixer and an interesting mix of people to approach.  I was especially enchanted with some folks from the UK (Jackie Danicki, the SpannerWorks team) who apprised me of the state of Web2.0 abroad.  Their take seems to be that it is lagging in comparison to the Bay Area, but then that’s a generalization that applies to many places, non?  What that really signifies, though, is that companies like SpannerWorks have a lead advantage in not only providing services, but educating companies on new media technologies like blogging.  Sounds like opportunity to me, especially since those who have held out on learning about new developments in communication are coming around now.  Anyway, I do have a fondness for interacting with Europeans - yes, I confess to being a Europhile.  Earlier last week, I got to also chat with some of the Wordpress developers hailing from abroad at WordCamp - the WordPress team is distributed and this was the first time they were assembled together in the same place to meet in real-life.  Anyway, meeting so many engaging Europeans in tech lately has poignantly reminded me of my ultimate desire to work abroad in technology, preferribly in the UK which is my #1 travel destination.  Doubtless, I impressed that theme on some of those people I met last week too, LOL!

Ah well that’s just a little update on the vanguard of high tech society in the Valley.  I am saddened to say that the invite passed me by for the killer mixer of the week, the upcoming TechCrunch party.  I seem to have a penchant for taking blog breaks right about when everyone’s queuing up weeks in advance for the next one of these.