Dave Winer was in town and held the first Scripting News brunch in Alexandria, VA. I made the trek out from Baltimore, a mere 56 mile drive (complicated somewhat by me getting pulled over less than a mile from my house; lucky for me, I got off with only a warning). Here's a quick recap.

First off, it was great to meet Dave after reading Scripting News for three years-plus. He has a knack for facilitating a conversation, which makes sense, since blogging is about conversation. The discussion ranged from the technological to the political (there's a good writeup over at ambivalent imbroglio). Dave gave me a chance to talk about Blogdigger, and I got some good copliments and comments, which was nice. I talked about what we do, and how, as well our special features, like Media and Groups. Dave brought up the subject of aggregators; he's a fan of the Radio-style aggregators that display your subscriptions as a river of data, as opposed to a three-paned interface. I mentioned that Blogdigger Groups is probably the only aggregator that defaults to this type of display.

Podcasting was discussed quite a bit; Andy Affleck talked about his podcast, Podcrumbs, which has a recent interview with Dave. Roger Strickland operates a new site called Slapcast.com, an application for podcasting by phone. As we're in DC, politics is on the brain, and the discussion on how Slapcast could be used by reporters covering events in and around Washington to create a real-time podcast program. You could easily imagine a network of reporters calling in reports from around town, as they happen, going directly on to a podcast feed and out to the world.

Others attending included Marcus, operator of Kmax BlogLinks, a directory of everything to do with blogs, Ray from ABCEDmindedness, Lou Josephs, whose got an amazingly recognizable radio voice, and David W. and his wife.

It was great meeting everyone, we should really have these kinds of things more often. Thanks Dave!