I was a little nervous about spending the evening with a couple hundred women and just a handful of guys. I’ve always considered myself a risk taker, however this was a bit of a stretch for me. There I was at a BlogHer’08 Alltop/Kirtsy cocktail party – a Georgia boy – on the other side of the country, surrounded by hundreds of very opinionated women, drinking some of the best wine San Francisco has to offer, and talking a hundred miles an hour. And I’ve gotta confess, I still have a hard time thinking of myself as a blogger.
Well, I guess I had plenty of reason to feel safe, because this particular soirée was hosted by the very 
interesting and gracious Guy Kawasaki and his new venture Alltop, a web site designed to aggregate blogs (or RSS feeds specifically) by topic. They call it a “digital magazine rack of the Internet” - which is cool because it’s easy to google specific words, but it hasn’t been easy to scan information online by categories I’m interested in such as golf, startups or venture capital. (By the way, you can find us listed in Alltop under startups. Yes, we’re cool.)
As for Guy Kawasaki’s live/work environment, who knew you could have sixty-foot palm trees around your pool, right next to your garage/office with your kids running around in the backyard of your beautiful home in the burbs of San Francisco and still call it work? And how do you tell your wife you’ve invited 250 blogging women over for a party at your house? Guy has certainly figured out the value of social media and has developed a good balance of mixing his personal life with his professional life. It was a pleasure to meet him and spend a little time talking with him in his home.
Once the wine kicked in and my nerves settled a bit, I met and learned a little more from what I found to be an amazing group of women. In my opinion, when “big business” finally figures out what Guy already has, social media is going to get really interesting.
Robert
May 2nd, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Where did you grow up, go to high school, etc?