Board Room with a view.

At least it isn’t raining.

New York is easily one of my favorite cities. The last time I was there I had the privilege of eating some really delicious Thai food, drink at an authentic Irish Pub, and scarf down 4,000 calories worth of White House burgers. Where else can you do that?

The Thai food that we had was at Thai Basil on 9th Ave. and W. 56th St. Thai Basil is, or rather was, what seems to be, a repurposed hallway or stairwell turned restraurant with a few small tables. The decor is clean, simple, and in typical asian style. The service was proper, prompt, and delicate.

Chris and Jon had either never had, or seldom had, Thai food before that day. So we were all in for a treat. Chris got squid and something curried. I can’t even remember, now, what I got. But it was delicious. Although 9th Ave. between West 54th and 56th streets is riddled with what I am sure is excellent Thai food restaurants – I can recommend Thai Basil on Manhattan.

The Irish Pub (which could have been either McGee’s on W. 55th or Connolly’s on E. 47th or maybe even a different pub altogether) all I know is that we walked, and walked, and walked before we stopped here for a couple of appetizers and some beer. Speaking of beer Jon had some sort of light beer. I had to fight off the entire staff to keep them from throwing Jon out by his neck and belt loop. While I was wrestling with the barkeep – I managed to scarf down a bunch of stuff mushrooms. Shhh, do you hear that? Ireland is absolutely screaming for Eliza and I to visit.

And the day was just getting started.

We had a lot more walking to do this day. You see, we’re not from New York City and so this is sort of a novel thing. Walking. Everywhere. To the library (which was closed). To another library (which was lame). To the pub, to a restaurant, through Times Square, back to our hotel, to the parking garage, back to the hotel, and ultimately – late at night – to White Castle.

I know what you might be thinking. Isn’t this post supposed to be about No Reservations? Anthony Bourdain’s show about traveling the world and eating some of the best food ever made by human hands? Yes. But if I know Tony. He digs a late night White Castle burger binge. So, off we went. Twelve blocks to the nearest White Castle. No problem. We had already walked miles and miles that day – why not a few more footsteps? We all ordered the exact same meal. Ten burgers and two fries. We ended up giving some of the food to a beggar sitting outside of White Castle (smart man). But most of us finished our double-portions of the greesy, grimey, and some would say disgusting little burgers that leave a wet spot on any table you set them on. I was sick.

In case you didn’t know the sign that you had a successful visit to White Castle is if you leave feeling like you want to puke.

Overall we had a very good time in New York. I always do. That is why I enjoyed seeing a different side of New York than the one I typically get to see in the latest episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations. Tony’s side. In this week’s episode Anthony shows us a portion of New York City that is slowly disappearing, being replaced, rebuilt, torn down, or put up for sale. Sad? Maybe for people like Tony who grew up in and around New York and have a history there. But for those of us that come into the city on occasion to soak up some of the city life, the culture, the food, the architecture, the noises, and again the food – New York is always changing. Always disappearing, being rebuilt, replaced, torn down, or being sold. It is what makes New York, New York.

Photo credit: Jon Christopher.

Date taken: July 15, 2003 – New York City.

In October Eliza and I will be heading to Oahu, Hawaii for a Social Media Summit in Waikiki. Shortly after that we’ll be attending both Podcamp Hawaii and Wordcamp Hawaii.

I don’t think it needs to be said that we’re both looking forward to attending these events.

In November, shortly after our return, I’ll be heading to New York City for Carsonified‘s Future of Web Design conference. I will have some exciting things to talk to developers about, regarding Viddler‘s new Developer Partner Program, and I think FOWD is the perfect venue for these discussions.

We were able to give away a fair amount of Viddler tshirts, in only a few minutes, at the DiggNation Meetup in Brooklyn, New York to those waiting in line for the live taping of DiggNation.  We did have one stipulation, however, that you must wear the Viddler tshirt right now in order to get one.

It was great to see so many Viddler tshirts within the first few rows of the crowd for the entire night.  Even one girl wearing a Viddler tshirt was up on stage in front of, what we’ve been told was, a capacity crowd at Studio B.  So it was a definite WIN.

Hope everyone enjoys their Viddler shirts!

After the conference Ryan Carson, founder of Carsonified, told the attendees they’d make the video available online for free to all attendees because of some of the presentations issues they had.  Turns out the weather was beautiful in New York City and, because of the sunlight shining through the Javits Center, it was hard to see the presentations on screen.  I asked Ryan if we could share it through Viddler in a private way to attendees and he said “Absolutely.”

Long story short, for the first time ever this video is now available to the public whether or not you attended the conference.  And don’t think because these presentations were done in November of 2007 that they aren’t just as valuable today as they were then.  I just watched them all again, as every one did a great job.

Some of the presenters from The Future of Web Design were Joshua Davis, Ryan Signer of 37signals, Jeffery Zeldman, Andy Clarke, Josh Williams, Brian Fling, Jonanthan Snook, Elliot Jay Stocks, Lea Alcantara, Ryan Sims and D. Keith Robinson, Jina Bolton, Cindy Li, and Matthew Patterson.

So here you go, one place to watch all of the video, download the slides, and download the audio from these presentations.  This just saved you $150USD!  Also, watch the Future of Web Design’s Viddler account, as I think there will be much more to see there in the future.

Source: The Future of Web Design, New York 2007 videos.

The GW Bridge costs $8USD to cross (for a car). Better than the $12USD you have to pay to go through the Holland tunnel to the south.

As a way to test mobile photos, again, here is a large orange 9 that sits somewhere in New York City. You might even see Viddler‘s newest Community Leader, Brandice, in there somewhere.

Date taken: January 11, 2008 | Resting on a street lamp on the lower-east side of Central Park in New York City.

Date taken: January 11, 2008 | A passage between 50-something and 50-something streets in New York City.

Date taken: January 11, 2008 | This Coca-Cola delivery man was working hard in New York City.

Date taken: November 08, 2007 | Burger King. INTERNET.

I suppose to best cover what I thought of the meetup, I’ll split it into “the good” and “the bad”. Though – more fittingly “the bad” should be labeled as “things I’d change for May”.

The good

The meetup is free! It isn’t everyday that you can attend a well organized, professional meetup like this without flying across the country, booking a hotel room, and paying some large entrance fee. Granted the meetup only lasts about two hours by design, but that is actually a good thing.

The meetup is structured in such a way that it is interactive, collaborative, and yet has enough constraints to not become a free-for-all where time could definitely be wasted, and focus lost. I saw many parallels between this meetup and Web2Open (or any *Camp for that matter) in that while someone “has the floor”, the audience can steer the discussion in any direction it’d prefer simply by asking questions.

Photo Credit: Eileen Barroso, Copyright: CU

The venue, Uris Hall at Columbia University on the west side of New York City, is nearly the perfect fit for the size of the audience and the meetup itself. A large projector and a podium for the presenter make it probably the best way to demo and take questions. Obviously, this being a classroom, makes it the perfect design for a meetup like this.

Yaron Samid, of Pando, is the meetup organizer and also moderates the meetup. I think Yaron does a superb job of keeping the discussion moving forward, getting the audience involved in the conversation, and treating everyone from presenter to attendee with respect. He also doesn’t try to promote himself or his company while he is moderating the meetup, something I’ve seen done before and never quite felt right. I’ve been to many meetups, expos, and events this year and Yaron is probably the best meetup organizer/moderator I’ve seen yet.

The bad

Or – what I think could be adjusted over the next few meetups.

Each presenter is given five minutes to demo their product/service to the audience, and then the audience is given five minutes to ask questions of the presenter. I like this balance of time – but I’d much rather see less presenters and more time allotted for demoing and Q & A. I think the meetup would benefit greatly by reducing the number of presenters each month by half, and allowing double the amount of time for demo and questions. How can you possibly demo a rich application with hundreds of features in five minutes? Ten minutes may still not be enough time, but at least it’d be enough time to give the highlights. Several of the demos that were given at this particular meetup, were cut short due to time – and although people can just go look at these sites themselves when they get home – I think that being able to show off the product/service in full would make for much better Q&A afterwards.

The Q&A session afterwards was nice, but I almost like the way that the panels handled it at South by Southwest a little better. People approached a microphone and stood in line waiting their turn. Although this venue doesn’t really adapt itself to that – perhaps raising your hand and leaving it up should be the way you’d be “in line”. Or even standing – instead of people just yelling out questions. I saw one person who left their comments on Meetup.com about the event say that they thought some of the questions got to be a little “snarky”. I agree. Though the attendees aren’t journalists trying to make nice – the hard questions are the ones that people want to ask the most. I’d love to see a little more structure here – but overall it seemed to work well.

And finally, there was supposed to be time for “announcements” by the attendees at the end. Some people were looking to hire, some were looking for jobs, others wanted to announce something. I think that this is a huge problem to solve since it’d be nearly impossible to give everyone in the room the time they need. That, and once the presentations and Q&A are over, many people left rather quickly. Perhaps an announcement could be given at the beginning, that any person/company with an announcement should stay afterwards and would be given 30 seconds. Then they’d at least have the opportunity to say something like – “I’m looking for a good graphic designer, please see me if you’re interested.”. This opportunity was lost this time – and I heard many people expressing that they were upset about that.

Photo Credit: Yaron Samid
Geno from AOL and I

Oh, one more thing that I’m just going to inject into this post – the NY Video 2.0 Meetup needs a photographer to attend. Many events on the west coast get great photo coverage – and I’m sure video coverage won’t be too big of an issue – but I’ve yet to find many photos of the event online so I think that someone should step up to the plate that lives in or near NYC.

Note: If you were at the NY Video 2.0 Meetup in New York and had an announcement – run over to Viddler, create a free account, use our “record with webcam” feature and put your announcement there. Be sure to share it with me or tag it with video2meetup, and I’ll try to get it in from of Yaron so that we can help broadcast those announcements to all the attendees.

Conclusion

If you have the chance to get to one of these meetups, I highly recommend it. I had a great time – I love trying to support east coast events like this, and it was a good opportunity to meet people that work in our industry at some level. I’m looking forward to the next time I have the opportunity to meetup.

If you’d like to watch all of the presentations I was able to record them all on video and put them on Viddler. For a recap in text-form, I recommend reading through CenterNetworks coverage of the event.

[tags]new york city, nyc, video 2.0, meetup, yaron samid, centernetworks, video, viddler, columbia university[/tags]
[slug]nyvideo2meetup-thoughts[/slug]