Oct. 30, #FollowFriday
This week's post is a continuation of last week's #FollowFriday post, as I only touched the surface on the friends, new and old, whom I met in person for the first time at Blog World Expo in Vegas a couple of weeks ago.Last week I concentrated on people I've known the longest but never met (with one exception). This week will be a mix of people I've known for a little while and brand-new folks. All are cool peeps I'm glad to know now.@DanielHonigman: Dan Honigman is one of those people who I've known for what seems like forEVer. He was on Digg, he helped create Col. Tribune when he was at the Chicago Tribune, he went to my alma mater (the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University), we know lots of the same people between social media and the real world of newspaper journalism (dying a very inelegant death at the moment). We've talked on the phone, exchanged IMs, e-mails, discussed career choices. Never met in person until BWE. Funny story - I was live-tweeting, saw a tweet from him, so I DM'd him, asking if he was in the same room as I was. Sure enough, he was, but on the opposite end of a very large room. A couple minutes later, I notice another DM from him, asking if I was wearing a red shirt (I was, but not in the Star Trek sense). I responded affirmatively. Shortly after, another DM, "Turn around." And there, sitting behind me, was Dan the all-around man. And there you have it.@Jaybol: Anyone who's been on Digg for more than five minutes know Jason Lankow, even if they don't know they know him. Using the moniker Jaybol, Jason has racked up an impressive 1,200+ front page submissions on Digg and has a pretty freaky avatar. Turns out, that's a Halloween costume from a couple years ago. The real Jason is not scary at all and he's about to become a daddy! His wife just finished up her first trimester and I gleefully explained how his social life as he knows it is about to come to an end. I think I addicted him to craps for life, however. Ah, well, a few losing rounds should cure him of that.@MadLid: What a trip to meet Lidija Davis in person. Unfortunately, our stays in Vegas didn't overlap very long, so we didn't have much time to hang out. She's a tech journalist — or, as her Twitter profile says, "information nut." She holds her own with the boys of The Drill Down very nicely (see last week's FF for her cohorts, MrBabyMan, MSaleem and 0boy) and is ever so very Australian.@Joshua_Ritchie: Another one of my craps buddies, I had never met Joshua online, or off, before Blog World. I had run across his work before, however, as he's a writer for Mint.com and his firm, Column Five Media, does some wicked cool infographics. He and Jaybol stayed up for hours after we finished winning at craps, telling everyone about how much fun it is to play craps. I reminded them that there is a reason it is called a "crapshoot." Sometimes you win, and sometimes ... you don't.@Techspian: His username is like thespian, an actor, but has "tech" instead, so it's like he's a performer with tech, get it? James Tamplin is part of the team behind Envolve.com, which is a really nifty commenting tool. It's in private beta, but he gave me and a few of my buddies the first-ever look at it, and it could be the Next Big Thing. Or, at the very least, a very healthy medium-sized thing. Seriously, though, it's a cool way of interacting on a site. And besides that, he's a helluva nice guy and didn't hold it against us when he lost at craps.@ArjunSingh: You know how every now and again you meet someone who becomes your friend right away? Arjun hung out with us at the Chicago Now party at the Hilton and laughed at all my jokes. I knew I liked him. Before long, we were chatting away as if we'd been fast friends for a long time and he joined a group of us for dinner. Sure, that's what you're supposed to do at networking events, I suppose, but how often do you actually WANT to? Anyhow, he's a do-gooder and is involved in citizen journalism way up in the wilds in Kamloops, British Columbia. (Say Kamloops out loud a few times, it'll cheer you up, I guarantee it.)Anyhow, that's it for this week - five more cool folk from Blog World Expo. I have a few more people I'd like to introduce you to, plus some quick mentions of other folks I've #FF'd before, but I got to actually meet at BWE.