Congratulations to all involved that have worked very hard and made a big difference in Philadelphia.

Alex Hillman, cofounder of Independence Hall, covers it a bit more thoroughly.

Early Saturday at Indy Hall
View more photos from Indy Hall.

Independents Hall is nested nicely in Old City, two-floors above Strawberry Street (or what could be called an alley), and is now the venue for the future of coworking in Philadelphia. Spending the better part of the day there, on a Saturday, working with a few other people is a real joy. The space, the people, the weather – all factors in inspiring productivity.

My main reason for coming to Independents Hall on this day was to be part of the judging panel for the Viddler MealToday contest and to use the space’s grand opening party as the backdrop for the announcement of its winner. Alex Hillman, and the rest of the coworkers at Indy Hall, were all extremely accommodating – allowing us to take over a few of their desks for the day, a good portion of their second floor, their projector, and their board room. Really, we couldn’t have asked for better hosts.

I had a ball seeing all of the people in Philly again and had a great time judging MealTodays with Scott McNulty, Marisa McClellan, Rob Sandie, and Gary Vaynerchuk. We’ll be releasing a video later today We’ve released a video on the Viddler Spotlight (our blog), which shows what went on that night and that should give you a good glimpse into what it was like to be at Indy Hall’s party and to be judging the MealTodays.

With well over 100 people in attendance there is no doubt in Philadelphia’s interest in coworking and community (and probably champagne). Such support makes me both jealous and inspired to someday setup a coworking space further north of Philadelphia. But that won’t be until I have time to settle down.

If I didn’t get to say hi to you while in Philadelphia, sorry. I’ll be in again this weekend for Podcamp Philly.

This morning I was, finally, able to begin uploading some video from WordCamp onto Viddler. I noticed I was having a few hiccups while doing so, but wasn’t sure where the problem was; between my computer, the Internet connection, and Viddler itself. Turns out, Viddler is now being used by Download.com. Combine that with the amount of traffic we’ve been seeing lately, and with a few of our videos ending up on Lifehacker, Digg, and a few other popular destinations lately – and you can see why our network is being put to the test. But these are good problems…

Today I’m meeting with the CFO of Opera to discuss some things about community. The My Opera Community has recently surged passed 900,000 users – so congratulations to their team.

Between work, play, San Francisco, trying to be a tourist, meetings, and the traffic issues – today has been pretty crazy.

How is your day going?

This morning kicked off with Alex Hillman, of Independents Hall, and Doug Bellenger, of PhindMe.mobi talking about working remotely, coworking in Philadelphia, the challenges that surface and how those are handled by those in attendence. Several people brought up simply using Twitter to communicate and obviously other PIM managers, etc.

10:30am – A discussion about the mobile web, cell phones, and how technology in this area is far more advanced overseas.

Scott McNulty (photo | video)

1:30pm – While I’m listening to Scott McNulty‘s second session of BlogPhiladelphia about group blogging I just made his session about negative comments public over on Viddler.

We’ve also featured the first session video from yesterday so if you would like to review this session via video – now you can. Remember to just check the blogphiladelphia tag on Viddler for more video.

2:10pm – Partial video of Scott’s session on group blogs is also now available. Recorded with webcam!

Update: Just acquired is PhillyGeeks.net which will be a vanilla wordpress blog soon where anyone in Philadelphia that would like to write on the blog can do so. Hooray! Oh, and even though I’m not from Philadelphia – I am an adopted blogger from Philly for those unaware.

2:25pm – The OpenGrid session has now trickled into the main ballroom and this discussion is being lead by David Dylan Thomas about links and how they are being used.

Side note: uwishunu.com has a posted a few photos to their blog as well as to the official BlogPhiladelphia Flickr Pool. Thanks to Jason Smith, and many others, for such great photos of this event.

Update: The day wrapped up with a presentation of Toonamation, a very cool plugin that gives you the ability to do a “cell shade” effect (among other effects) to your videos frame by frame. Really, really cool.

Update: I managed to record the video demo of Toonamation and it is now available.

The crew on South Street after the last Meetup

It looks like Tony Green and I will be having a conversation so please be sure to join in as we discuss Microformats (which I’ve used to markup this post by the way).

I was finally able to pull Alex Hillman out of his shell. He was recently interviewed by Philadelphia Weekly about his efforts in CoWorking. You may want to pick his brain about this…

I just hope this snow doesn’t affect our plans. Though I think we’re pretty determined.

Note: You can add this event to your calendar program of choice since this post is marked up using hCalendar. Enjoy.

[tags]meetup, philadelphia, pennsylvania, ten stone, tony green, microformats, coworking, alex hillman, events, hcalendar[/tags]
[slug]meetup-031707[/slug]