To The Summit...And Beyond!

I joined some other local bloggers last night in attending El Wapo's "Blogger Summit" at WaPo HQ on 15th street. Basically it was a get together between the top brass of the newspaper and online divisions and the local blog community. The word "blogosphere" was uttered continuously (I was all like "Say blogoshpere again!") and Celeste recalled an instance of one of the Post higher-ups saying the phrase "shout-out," thus ruining it for the rest of us forever.

I have to say, I thought it incredibly cool for a giant media entity like The Post to do something like this. The night was divided into three parts, a Q&A session between the some of the editorial staff and the bloggers, a presentation from a high powered libel lawyer (for our benefit) and a first look at the Post's forthcoming blog aggregator tool.

However, with the way things went, I wonder if The Post will do something like this again. All the ego maniacs in the room ruined the Q&A part of the night by mainly asking questions about how they can get their stories into The Post and things of that nature. One guy not-so-subtly accused The Post of repeatedly stealing stories from bloggers and when asked for an example, couldn't produce a single one. Ouch. The Beta unveiling was more of the same. All the tech geeks in the room started tearing The Post's new feature apart (even though it's still in development and not online yet!) because it didn't have things like geocoding.

Side note: Does anyone give a shit about geocoding? I certainly don't. Do I need to know what blogs about U Street are actually written in apartments on U Street? Seems like a tool for stalkers more than anything else.

Anyways, the night digressed into a big "I'm a big tech geek and your new service will suck because it can't do blah, blah, blah" even though this new service is obviously for people that don't read blogs regularly and is the Post's way of trying to give the locals some love. Which, ya know, they don't have to do. Jeezy Creezy. In the end, Catherine and I concluded that blogging was fun to do but not so fun to talk about. That said, Catherine and Tom wrote up their thoughts.

I missed my train by two minutes on the way home, so I tried my first attempt at some long exposure shots (featured above)while I was waiting for the next one. Some turned out better than others. Obvs. More stuff over on Flickr.

Tonight: Bulls v. Wiz and (hopefully) after the game, Leaf v. Agent Zero.