The Marketing Technology Blog

Yes… yes, we did it! I actually got out from under the rock I crawled under months ago and did a social event. Perhaps not the kind of social event you might think of… I did a Tweetup! A Tweetup is a physical meeting of Twitter users… or Twitterers.

The Tweetup was at Buffalo Wild Wings up on the North West side of Indianapolis.

At the Tweetup was Matthew Flett, who I had ironically met yesterday at the Indianapolis Business Book Club and will run into tomorrow when we meet with Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy. Matt is a technophobe and works with Apparatus, a regional Microsoft Gold Partner who also works with Bluelock (it’s a small world!).

The highlight of the evening was meeting Dr. Thomas Ho. Dr. Ho and I have been exchanging notes, ideas, and working on some regional projects together, like the Indianapolis Cultural Trail - but we’ve never actually met until tonight! He’s a fantastic techy and it felt good to be sitting across the table with another middle-aged guy when we were surrounded by young folks! It’s also exciting to know that the Professor of Computer and Information Technology at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) is so engaged in New Media and Technologies!

When we finally met each other, it was speaking to a friend that I’ve had for years. I look forward to working with Dr. Ho as much as I can. That is, if he’ll look up from Twittering on his handheld long enough.

I spent a lot of time speaking to Stephen James. Stephen works for a regional Advertising Agency as a web development guru and has a blog on media creation and marketing. Stephen also reminded me he zinged me on my blog when I argued against posting your email address even though I had mine readily available for crawlers in my resume (stored as a PDF and linked to).

Stephen and I also had some fun with Alex Conner, a student of Dr. Ho - whom Dr. Ho speaks highly of. Alex took us on a gory tour of his websites that he’s developed using iframes, tables, image maps and yes… even popups. I was horrified, but told Alex to stick with us and we’d help him through his Web 0.9 technology.

In his defense, Alex did put us onto an incredible new linux web hosting company, called Slicehost. As the name suggests, Slicehost is the hosting company of the future - providing a virtual hosting environment where your site isn’t in an absolute physical position - but is a slice of a cloud of servers. One of the amazing features of Slicehost, aside from price, was the brilliant speed that it had.