Agylen

… and all I got was this lousy picture.

OK, to be honest, I got quite a bit more than that ;). First of all some nice food, thanks to the chef of the Ditirambo restaurant.

Second, we got some good conversation, which unfortunately ended a bit too soon, as Dave has a flight early this morning, so he did not want to go to bed too late. In a couple hours, however, we managed to talk about growing up in the Bronx, living in America, what coming from a family of eastern European refugees means (on this point Dave and Gaspar had some stories to share), American politics (Dave seems to expect something radically new before the next presidential election; as for us, we weren’t so optimistic), artificial organs (Roberto, who is a physician and an engineer, told us about working for the team that made the first, partially successful, artificial heart and meeting Barney Clark), Twitter (every other person at the table seemed to be a Twitter user and told me that I have to try it to really get it) and of course blogging.

With respect to blogging, I noticed how Italian bloggers appear to be split in two, mostly disjoint, groups. On one side, we have bloggers who write in English, mostly geeks who do IT for a living and constantly write about technology, using English to reach out to and connect with a global network. On the other side, we have bloggers writing in Italian, usually on a much broader range of topics. My impression is that interconnections between the two communities are very sparse, but I don’t have much hard data to back up my claim. What’s certain is that, at that table yesterday, me and Gianugo were the odd ones out.

Italian-language bloggers also seem much more prone to meet up frequently and do camps and unconferences. We IT guys, of course, have our conferences and trade shows already where we can meet.

As for Dave, he can be a very nice guest, always trying to fire up the conversation, involve everyone (not that easy with people sitting at a long table, which tends to create at least two separate groups) and ligthen up the evening with songs. He also seems to be quite outspoken, though always using a soft voice tone. It’s not surprising that he manages to make quite a few enemies. Even though he says he never picks fights with people, he has no qualms about kicking around their ideas.