Naked Launch
Last night Anita and I were invited to a book launch party for Shel Israel and Robert Scoble's new book Naked Conversations. (Book blog here.)

It was a great party! Wonderful atmosphere due to the historic mansion where the party was hosted, good food, decent beer, and even an espresso stand. (Meaning that I got to sandwich a couple of Fat Tire Ales between a pair of double Americanos; my idea of good drinking!) I had some very interesting conversations, split about 60/40 between people I knew and new acquaintances.

The funny thing was how often the people I knew had little or no relation to each other, other than Robert and myself (and, usually, Robert and I knew them from different contexts); even including someone I worked with during the year I spent in Michigan a while back. I'm beginning to think that Seattle geekdom is a much a smaller community than one would expect. Alex Barnett and I were discussing this and I postulated that, if you were to draw a Venn diagram of our different social circles, there would be too many overlaps to represent them all in two dimensions. (Alex's party report.)

(Note to self: Invite Alex and his lovely wife over for dinner some time.)

Besides Alex and myself, there were several other Seattle Mindcamp alumni there. Given the subject of the book, and Scoble himself, the concentration of bloggers was very nearly at critical mass as well; any more and it would have erupted into a convention or something. This led, quite naturally, to lots of blog reports (which Scoble is listing). Plus a lot of people brought cameras, so there are Fickr streams here (start using sets Scoble!) and here and most likely more to come. Yes, I'm in some of them. I'm the handsome one.

Oh, and Chris Pirillo has a video review of the book which you absolutely must see.

I'm looking forward to reading Naked Conversations! (And yes, I did accuse Scoble of titling the book that way in order to increase the search engine hits...)