Happy Birthday, Dear Om Malik, Happy Birthday to You

Check out the photos of last night’s party here.

Wow, another perfect night in San Francisco. Last night about 120 people showed up for a swanky kind of VIP tech rub elbows sort of thing at Pier 38 in San Francisco. Technically it was a GigaOm / Xing party but I liked the fact that we all got to wish Happy Birthday to Om and watch him try to blow out candles that keep relighting after you blow them out. Happy Birthday indeed Om.

There were a lot of interesting people to say hello to and talk with about where things are going in techland. I had a good chance to catch up with Narendra Rocherolle, just back from Europe. Narendra is one third of the 30 Boxes team along with his wife Julie and their partner Nick. 30 Boxes has been my default calendar and it rocks. Narendra was talking about doing some interesting things coming up with some partners with 30 Boxes’ API. Interesting. 30 Boxes already synchs up nicely with Flickr and upcoming and is really smooth. We talked about ways that calendars should be smarter, like when you put someone’s birthday on your calendar it should ask you when the year they were born is to remind you of how old they are in each consecutive year. And what year was that you were born in again Om?

I also had fun hanging out with Daniel Burka and Kevin Rose from Digg. Digg is another service that I love. We talked about how Digg cultivates their fanatical users. It’s kind of crazy but there are so many hardcore diggers that just live in digg. They breath it. They know everything about the company, what it’s doing and are really plugged in. How do you get your users to that level of commitment to a site. Kevin said that they have a bunch of great new features coming up in the next three months or so that they will be unrolling and Daniel and Kevin kept saying that they man, they wish they could release them today, so expect more Digg goodness coming up.

I was the only guy in a t-shirt at the party by the way but I felt ok because it was my Diggnation t-shirt from their Rev3 launch last week.

It was great finally meeting the lovely Katie Fehrenbacher. I’d read her stuff at Red Herring before and now her stuff that she does with GigaOm and it’s first rate.

What party wouldn’t be complete without Web 2.0 Blogger Mike Arrington. Mike was there and talked about coming back from Yahoo!’s Hack Day where he was both MC and judge for the competitions. Fun stuff.

John Battelle, who does the ads for this blog at FM Publishing, was there as well. FM is doing very well these days and continues to bring in great bloggers as well as command some really great CPM rates for their authors. John was talking about the fact that FM is at a really good place right now. Many of the advertisers are on their 2nd and 3rd buys and are beginning to see the results of what for some was an initial test into the value of advertising on trusted blogs. Apparently it is working and John talked about how many of their largest advertisers are re upping for significantly larger and more permanent media buys. Congratulations John. I have to say that my experience with FM has been fantastic.

It was great talking to MJ from Photobucket. I met Kurt and Julie from Photobucket earlier this year down at Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch7 party. MJ has a pretty good attitude on life. She likes to kiss people. Which is super cool. Just ask Kevin Rose, Daniel Burka, and Nick Douglas. MJ explained to me that when people are kissed that they can’t help but smile which is the best for getting a great photo of them. I like the way this woman thinks.

Irina Slutsky and Eddie Codel were there representing Geek Entertainment Television. They didn’t seem to be filming but certainly this was one party that tech celebrity TV would want to be at. Nick Douglas was there from Valleywag as well of course. He was trying to track down John Battelle and say hi.

It was good seeing Rafe Needleman from CNET. Rafe wrote up a really nice piece on Zooomr a while back talking about our new portalling functionality. Rafe did a tour of the CNET offices with our portals that you can see here.

Kathy Johnson and her husband Dominic Johnson were great hosts along with Xing, the wine guys and Om. Kathy and her husband have a company called Consort Partners and both are delightful people. Fortunately for Om we were able to get Kathy to pose with him so that I would have another shot for my GigaStud SmartSet on Zooomr. It was nice meeting you both and thanks for the hospitality.

Tony Conrad was there with his two sons who you might say represented the Web 3.0 contingent. Tony is the Founder and CEO of Sphere, a blog search engine that I’m embarrased to say I haven’t spent much time with. I’m definitely going to check it out though and see how it works over the course of the next few weeks. Tony’s sons had actually seen some of my photography which kind of blew me away as I think it was the first time anyone under 16 has every complemented me on my pictures. I think it’s great that your kids got to hang out with us last night Tony.

What was at this tech meet up that you don’t see at every tech meet up of course was a wine tasting. We tasted some excellent Pinot Noirs from Eric Hall and and Mark McWilliams. Eric, by the way is the founder of the Pinot Festival up in the Russian River Valley that is taking place October 27, 28, and 29th. They look to have 75+ great Pinot Producers. Now maybe *that* is something that Scoble and I should do a photowalk of.

Carl Franklin from College Hill and I had a great conversation about photography. Like me Carl has a 5D and likes to shoot flowers among other things. He has a great collection of images although doesn’t have them all up online yet. Come on over to Zooomr and upload a few of them Carl. I’d love to see the work that you do. I love shooting flowers myself. The San Francisco Flower Mart on an early weekend morning or Filoli Gardens down in Woodside in almost any season are some of the best places to shoot flowers in the Bay Area.

There were so many other great people to catch up with there. Niall Kennedy, Jeff Clavier, Nicole Kidd, Pooj Preena who works at Jangl, and lots more. I’m terrible with names and my apologies in advance for not mentioning you by name if we chatted or for getting your name for a photograph of you if I got one. Please feel free to identify people in the comments on the photos and I’ll tag them appropriately. Also if you are in any of the photos that I’ve taken please sign up for a Zooomr account and let me know what your Zooomr ID is. I can people tag you with these photos and then they will be a part of your Zooomr profile. It’s free to join by the way.