This month I was glad to meet Joe Heck over at Rhonabwy. Joe didn't make it to the last meeting that we showed up for, and I've been reading his blog for a while, so I was glad to meet him in person. I didn't even know that he was interested in Chandler. I'll add his name to the list of people clamoring for pylucene as a separate project.

Good to see some familiar faces as well. Even though Anita doesn't think of this as her meetup, I certainly do. It's not that she does anything that looks like she's trying to take it over, it more that she's very good at making people feel at home and introducing people. I saw her doing that again last night, and I think it's great. Good to see Jack as well, although the events of last week were still heavy on him. I was glad to see him having a good time. Phil showed up early and remembered us and the girls before vectoring off to the Democratic meetup, and today he sent the nice gift of a photo. Scoble was also a familiar face, even though it's probably been a year since I last saw him in the flesh. But reading his blog pretty much keeps me up to date on his comings and goings. It was interesting to hear about his adventures in anti-professional video. Maryam, however was not a familiar face, and it was good to meet her and get a little bit of a sense for her as a person. She and Julie spent some serious time talking, so I hope that she enjoyed the meetup.

The whole blogging thing has been interesting for me and Julie, because I never expected to find us really into something like this together. Julie is as engaged with blogging as I am. No, she's more engaged. So it's really been interesting to watch things play out with her and blogging and then have it cross over into the physical world.

Which brings me to my penultimate thought on last night. Nothing against the Democratic meetup, but I consider it to be a serious bug in Meetup.com when they allow two large meetups to be scheduled at a venue that can really only hold one. If Meetup.com were totally free, I might not mind so much. But since you have to pay money in order to propose venues, it would be nice if Meetup.com could warn two meetups that they are speeding towards each other like locomotives.

One of the most interesting things that happened all night was when the organizer of the Democratic meetup called his meeting to order and discovered that there was a second meetup in the space. It took a little while (over all the noise and bodies) to make him aware that we were a weblogger's meetup. When he repeated that to his people, it sort of felt to me that he didn't know what webloggers were or what role they've been playing in the campaign. I found this to be very interesting, since the Democratic party is supposedly the party of weblogging. Somebody forgot to tell this fellow, or worse, he knew but had decided that the webloggers hadn't contributed very much and/or didn't have much else to contribute. I have no idea if this analysis is correct or not, but I did see the interaction with my own eyes, and I think that it was Phil that I double checked my reaction with.