Sept. 25, #FollowFriday

I had the extreme pleasure on Monday of finally meeting one of my oldest friends on Digg.com, Tal Siach. After dinner in Union Square, we met up with a whole mess of other diggers and bloggers and other folks whom I've "known" in the social media sense but never met face to face, even after years, sometimes, of contact.So I thought that in honor of Tal's visit Stateside, I'd #FollowFriday those folks I've known for a while but only just got to meet for the first time this week.@TalSiach: Naturally, I have to start with Tal. One of the nicest and most honorable people you could meet in the online world, Tal was, as I said, one of my first friends on Digg (my entree to the social media field). When I was an utter n00b on Digg and had virtually no front pages to my name (possibly even before I had a single one, it's hard to remember), Tal was always there on the other end of my IM, offering encouragement and advice. When I was laid off, Tal was one of the first people telling me I didn't have to go look for any new job, I could make things work myself. I'm proud to call Tal a friend, without quote marks around the word.@MensFitness: Well, this isn't Devin Pratt's personal account, but Devin and I have been Digg friends for quite some time and it was just so nice to meet face-to-face. I remember many, many IM conversations between us where we'd try to figure out what category some post would work best in or checking to see if we could get a shout to help boost a submission. Oh, and, by the way, Devin is part of the website The Longest Trip, which is basically a place for guys to blog about their 30s and 40s. He and Stephen, below, are both part of the team behind the site.@sbcea: Stephen Bailey is a raconteur, a manabouttown, a digger, a tweeter. Basically, Stephen's a freelance writer who's all over the place writing about all sorts of stuff. And he Diggs and Tweets and is just an all-around nice guy. Plus, he spent about an hour discussing 24 with myself and @ShawnMSmith, whom I #FF'd in my Music FollowFriday post, but only met for the first time in person this week. Yeah, we talked about the Jack Bauer hour for an hour or more. Wanna make something of it?@Casspa: Cass Anderson is another person I've known on Digg for what seems like forever. I got to meet him at the beginning of the night, with his lovely girlfriend. We started chatting, more people arrived, mixing began and next thing you know, I'm on a train going back home to Jersey and Cass and I didn't get to actually have a conversation. That's OK, because we're on each other's IM and actually know who we're talking to now. Plus, we're both in the NY metro area and we'll get to meet up at some other ... meetup, and next time we'll actually already know what each other looks like.In going through my whole list of everyone, it turns out I'd already met most of the folks there in person at some event or another. So this week is only four (but you get five if you count Shawn, so I'm gonna count him) recommendations, but that's OK. There were other very cool people there, most of whom I've already FF'd some other time, or whom I know I'll get to soon.As usual, please note in the comments if there are any folks you think I should be following. Always like to check out new folks on Twitter.