Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp’s Web 2.0 blog

Last night geeks from across Maryland, Virginia, the District of Columbia (DC), and other parts of the country converged upon a club near Dupont Circle, MCCXXIII (1223), for TECH cocktail DC 2.

It was PACKED. I heard from someone that 350 tickets were given out to the event.

It was so cool to have so many of my friends in one place at one time. Kudos to Frank Gruber and Eric Olson for putting on a great event.  I hope they do it in DC again soon.

(Great photo taken by Jason Garber)

There are two big DC tech events this week that you should be at.

The first is Refresh DC.   It’s tonight at 7pm in Arlington, VA. There is going to be a panel of leaders of local startups giving their advice and thoughts about their experiences.  I’m confident it will be great!  Everyone goes out to the pub afterwards.

Tomorrow is TechCocktail at 6:30pm at MCCXXIII. This is less structured and is more of a booze and schmooze event.  Unfortunately, I believe this event is sold out.  Hopefully, you got tickets.  They were free.

Had a blast at PodCamp DC this weekend!  It was great to see old friends and meet some people that don’t typically come out to DC tech events. Kudos to the organizers Tammy and Joel.

Here are some of my photos from the weekend:

I had the pleasure of getting to know some of the awesome guys from Freshbooks at Future of Web Apps (FOWA) Miami.   We chatted over drinks and they told me about how they planned on taking South By Southwest (SXSW) by storm and they sure did.

Saul Colt, one of the guys on their marketing team, wrote up a great post on what Freshbooks did to get their name out at SXSW.   It’s fantastic and will serve as a guide for me for next year.

Tonight I was having dinner with a friend  whom I have a TON of respect for.   We both agreed there are more and more people who want to be noticed. There are a lot of people in the Web space and everyone wants to be the ones to bubble up to the top.

The thing is too many people do it the wrong way.  They come off as wanting to sell themselves (no one likes that guy) or they really spam people with their personality.  People just tune spam out.  You don’t wanna become white noise.

For me, if you want me to notice you, you need to first do good work.  Be good at what you do.  Give it 100%.  Don’t half ass it.

Second… give without  thinking about what you’re going to get in return.  Help people just because you wanna help.

These are the people that will stick on my radar and I’ll even go out and tell my friends about them. People like to see their friends succeed.

For example, when you’re looking for a job, you’ll have people who’ll go out of their way and help you search.

If you’re new to the DC tech scene or you’re just looking for an opportunity to hang out with some geeks, I’d highly recommend that you check out the upcoming event TECH cocktail DC 2.

Frank Gruber and company are throwing another one of their great parties on Thursday, April 24, 2008 from 6:30pm - 9pm at the club MCCXXIII.

The best part is it’s free, which means you don’t have a reason not to be there.

Are you going? I definitely plan on being there.

So Twitter was a big success at SXSW for bringing people together.  As was laid out by Jeremiah Owyang, it was used to revolt against the Zuckerberg/Lacey interview, improve panels, and to find/start parties.

But what empowered Twitter to be so helpful? Most of it’s users were in the same geographic area.

I have Twitter friends from all over the country… all over the world.  There are times when I want to be able to see what everyone in my “global neighborhood” is doing.  That is fine.

There are other times when I want to go grab a beer and I’m curious what everyone else is up to.   What my friends in Boulder, Colorado are doing doesn’t help me find beer drinking company here in Washington DC.

It’d be cool if there was a mobile app that would append my geo-location or maybe just my zipcode on to the end of all my and my friends’ Twitter messages.

In addition to saying I always want to get SMS messages from certain twitter users, I could get SMS messages when tweets happen in my same geographic location.  Seems like this would be useful.

This make sense?

Tonight I was on my way to church for an event they were having and wanted to stop by Port City Java in Eastern Market to grab a coffee before I went over.  I had to get the coffee to-go because the coffee shop closed at 7pm.

Coffee shops really shouldn’t close at 7pm.

In today’s society, seems like the only place you can go to hang out after work is a bar.  Don’t get me wrong.  I have no problems with beer or wine, in moderation but there are plenty of times I want a place to hang out after work that isn’t a bar.

It will be 9pm.  I’ll be doing work from home and I’ll kind of have an itch to get out.  But where do you go?

If Port City Java were to stay  open later, the coffee shop could become a center of the neighborhood.  Instead of folks staying home, they could come out at night to a safe community centric place.

What if you brought in local musicians? What if you had a little movie screen?  What if you had talks or poetry readings?  All of a sudden the coffee shop is the hip and cool place to be.  You’re selling more coffee and making more money.

Importantly, people would be getting out of their houses and hanging out with their neighbors in community.

When I live in Lansing, Michgan,  every so often I’d meet my friends for coffee at Beaners (now called Bigby’s) in East Lansing  because it was open late, well actually all night (i think).  It was a happening place.  It was always packed full of people.  I want something like this in DC.

What do you think? Would you go to a late night chill coffee shop?

It seems like this year the DC tech community was at South by Southwest (SXSW) in force.

As I mentioned before, when I got into town on Saturday after just walking the conference halls for 5 minutes, I ran into sooooo many DC people.

Other folks were noticing the massive Washington DC presence.   I’d meet people and mention that I was from DC.  They’d say “DANG, I’ve run into a ton of DC people here.”

The lyric from the Bob Dylan song “Ballad of a Thin Man” is so appropriate.

Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

Something is happening here in Washington DC.

Steve Rubel has a great blog post - “Startups That Fail to Invest in Trust Will All Die“…

Web startups need access to talent. Often they need capital too (and a smart strategy for managing it). But I am going to argue here that their most essential currency is trust. However, a lot of emerging companies in particular tend to ignore it.

Great post… I think he’s right on.