On my last night of official ‘work’ before going offline, I was able to meetup with Hawaii’s top bloggers, access this post directly (if you’re seeing this in a feedreader) to watch video.
Whenever I travel to a new city for business, I try to meet the local bloggers at a community dinner, I’ve now friends all over the world, and we connect on twitter, blogs, and social networks to keep track of each other. Ryan Ozawa (who has the only Hawaii licence plate “Blog”, see pic below), the community leader and early technology adopter helped organize this dinner of Oahu’s top bloggers. About 15 of us assembled at a local joint (I was the only tourist) and we had authentic food –minus the luau, dancing, or fire spinning. Believe me, this was a real treat for me. I’m not even going to link to the restaurant website as I don’t want to spoil it for the locals, but if you’re a smart web hunter, you’ll figure it out.
I spent some time with Welton, who lives in Waikiki, he took me to some local bars after dinner, (Ryan’s) and gave me the low down of life in Honolulu from a local’s perspective. Some of the guys were live streaming the dinner from their phone, a bit grainy, but you can follow in from this player. Check out the coverage from Ryan Ozawa.
Truly one of the most friendliest groups I have ever met, the Aloha spirit was really there, including receiving a gorgeous flower lei from Xapa.
The one thing I noticed is that when I’ve visited HK, Singapore, Portland, and now Hawaii for blogger dinners, the local tech community doesn’t get together as much in real life, they often need someone to trigger it forward. I certainly hope that this Oahu group can start meeting more frequently, and to grow their community. (Ryan Ozawa left a comment with more color around this, please read that below)
Ryan left his thoughts on his blog, and took a roll call of those who attended:
Burt Lum (@bytemarks) Cathy Chris (@techustle) Dave Zuls (@hawaiiseo) Ian Kitajima (@ikitajima) Jennifer Ozawa (@kilinahe) Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) Joe Philipson (@jphilipson) Jonathan Wong (@hawyn316) Kara Baker (@xapa) Lianne Kitajima (@lkitajima) Neenz Faleafine (@infinitypro) Roberto (@88hawaii) Ryan Ozawa (@hawaii) Welton (@welton)
