Find me at Digital Capital Week (#DCweek)

Digital Capital Week kicks off with a big party tonight at and around Long View Gallery in NW. There are a ton of great events (including one hosted by TBD) over the following week for the DC area digital/tech community.

DC Week photos

(Use dcweek tag on Flickr)

I’m looking forward to meeting a lot of new people and hanging out with some friends I’ve already made among local digiphiles since moving here a month ago. So here’s the place where I’m going to pull it all together. Below are the events I’m attending, and I’ll come back and update this post after the events with summaries, reactions and shoutouts. I’m pulling all the dcweek Flickr photos in to the slideshow here too.

If you want to meetup at one of these events, let me know.

Friday

Opening Party at Long View Gallery. This was a fun event, and a nice way to kick off the week by meeting a lot of participants at once. Highlights: virtual coloring of personal portraits, free drinks, intriguing performance artists. Lowlights: Heat was almost unbearable in the gallery area, no drinking in the alley was very inconvenient, drunk shirtless guy tried to crash the line Shoutouts: I met some great folks, including new co-worker Nathasha Lim who starts Monday as a TBD community host; Connected with Laura Cochran and met Jodi Gersh, both of Gannett; and met Josh Phelps, who manages Affinity Lab in Adams Morgan, and Brandon Minow, whom he is working with to organize the new philanthropic Monument Music & Arts Festival in DC.

Saturday

TBD Brunch at Mie N Yu in Georgetown. Excellent turnout from a number of bloggers, tech folks and others who just wanted to meet some of the TBD team. Highlights: Mimosas and pancakes, fun atmosphere. Lowlights: Parking in Georgetown (should have taken the bus) Shoutouts: Had a great time hanging out with Mary Kong of GirlMeetsFood; Keosha Johnson, online editor of WAMU; Jamel Daugherty of Northern Virginia Magazine; Andrew Hanelly, director of SEO and social media at TMG Custom Media; Krystle Kopacz of HealthCentral; Christen McCluney; Amelia of Gradually Greener; Ethan Klapper; and of course Allbritton Communications head honcho Robert Allbritton.

Monday

Mediabistro and Social Times cocktail party at 19th Bar. Nice to rub elbows with a lot of DC media types I haven’t met before. Highlights: Nice bar, with open floorspace and natural light. Decent drink specials and some complimentary appetizers. Lowlights: None really. Shoutouts: A lot of good ones here. I finally met some tweeps I’ve been following for a while, including Alex Howard (@digiphile) of O’Reilly Media, Dr. Mark Drapeau (@cheeky_geeky) of Microsoft and Andy Carvin (@acarvin) of NPR. Others included CNN social media guru Eric Kuhn, Patch regional publisher Daniel Kelly, Liz de Bagara of Boz Communications, Kiera Wiatrak, Erica Hendry. Marlene Hall, and Najeema of Hell in a Handbag.

Tuesday

Social and Traditional Media - 9:30 at Grosvenor Auditorium at National Geographic. A good panel featuring Andy Carvin of NPR (who I met Monday); Benet Wilson, Online Managing Editor for Aviation Week’s Business Aviation; Brian Dresher, Manager of Social Media and Digital Partnerships for USA TODAY; and Robert Michael Murray – VP of Social Media for National Geographic. Basic reaction: This was a good discussion of why social media use by journalists is important, and some ideas about how to do it. I would have appreciated a more forward-looking discussion about emerging social platforms, especially mobile and location-aware systems. Murray and Carvin are very ambitious thinkers who I recommend paying attention to. See some good summaries of the panel here and here.

The State of Now with Jeff Pulver – 11 at Grosvenor Auditorium at National Geographic. Jeff blows people away with his engaging manner and his clearly authentic appreciation and understanding of social relationships (online and off). He gave an interesting talk, the major theme being that for the first time in history every individual’s voice can gain power and influence through social networks. He also announced his new project JustCoz.org, which let’s Twitter users lend their “voice” to a good cause by allowing it to tweet through them once a day.

The Future of Media (panel) – 2 at Grosvenor Auditorium at National Geographic. A bit disappointing, and broadly criticized on the Twitter backchannel. Basic problem, 75% of the panel was from AOL, Washington Post and CNN — not that they aren’t doing anything online, but they’re certainly not at the cutting edge and had little to say about the “future.” Rather than rehash it myself, I’ll point you to Glenn Luther’s summary, which includes many quoted tweets.