Yesterday's East side blogger meetup was a particularly good meetup for me. I enjoy the Seattle meetup because it's a chance to meet bloggers that I don't normally read, but who are quite familiar with Julie. The east side meeting is definitely Microsoft heavy. The benefit is that lots of interesting people come to visit MIcrosoft, so there's a high likelihood of de-virtualizing relationships at the east side meetup. This happened a bit for me last night. I finally met jeanniecool from #joiito in person, something that we've been trying to do for quite some time now. Actually I think that the girls found that jeanniecool lived up to her nick last night. Liz Lawley and Buzz Bruggeman were both in town for the Microsoft search meetings, and stopped by. Liz spent a while talking with Julie, which I was very glad for. I'm happy that her circle of blogger friends is both expanding and de-virtualizing. Buzz was mobbed by people who were interested in ActiveWords, so I only got into a brief chat with him. Scoble and I did end up talking about the information overload problem, mostly from a technology point of view -- there were some fun ideas shooting around. It'll be a shame to miss his BloggerCon session. Dare stopped by and we discussed the ideas that he wrote about last night in his piece "Social Software is the Platform of the Future".

Kudos as always to Anita Rowland for her role in facilitating both the logistical and social aspects of the meetup. Double kudos to her husband Jack William Bell for taking my girls to the carousel along with R---.