Simon Thorneycroft and Jonathan Hodgson

London Geek Dinner

Jon and I attended the London Geek dinner last night, a fantastic experience and good to be able to say thanks to Robert Scoble for Channel 9. However, the event should more accurately have been termed the London Blogger dinner as it was populated by people whose careers spanned law (Scott Vine), marketing and journalism (it probably included many other professions, but that is the cross section of people that we spoke to).

Robert gave a brief after dinner speech at the Texas Embassy and then people asked questions about his experiences of blogging. At one point he was asked if he felt in constant danger of being sacked to which he stated that he had 'be smart' about what he blogged, but if he were to be sacked then he could go out and double his pay!

We talked about how people felt that blogging could be good for history: "Imagine a million Samuel Pepys or Anne Frank's diaries".

We got to talk to quite a few people, a particular theme of the evening for everyone was the use of RSS feeds over at backstage.bbc.co.uk and at one point we talked to an American journalist, Kevin Anderson, who was over at the BBC in London for a few months, he was interested in parsing up information from news that talked about key terrorists and where they rumoured to be in the world, once this information was placed on a timeline and displayed on a map, this meta information could improve the overall story.

Hi to Matt Richardson, Biscuit and Chris Prakoso.

All in all a great occasion, can’t wait for the next one!