Last night I had a dinner meeting with long time friend and uber blogger Bob Cox. Bob is best known as being the blogger who outed New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd for misquoting President George Bush and standing his ground against the Grey Lady and winning during his run with The National Debate a blog he has since retired, despite it being one of the best ever from the Blog 1.0 era.
For those of you who don't know Bob, he's also the mind behind a very cool and socially important organization, the Media Bloggers Association (MBA). In the sake of full disclosure I'm also the Treasurer and a board member of the group that is working with leading media organizations and media attentive organizations in the public eye to provide a working framework that will enable bloggers to be viewed in the proper light, and with the proper respect.
Bob and I have a long history and friendship that spans now ten years. As a matter of fact, if I had to put the root of how I met my future wife, Helene, Bob was the cause, as he pretty much insisted that I attend the 2004 BloggerCon at Stanford and while Bob and his family live in New Rochelle, NY we do our best to stay in touch regularly using all the tools available.
At the dinner meeting Bob brought me up to speed on all the current and near term things that are happening with the MBA. Some are right on course and others are downright mind boggling how Bob has been able to make some very impressive things happen. I mean the new web site is nothing compared to what Bob and the MBA has coming in 2007.
Bob shared all this with me in real time as we collaborated on ideas and caught up on what's going on with friends, family, bloggers and some cool concepts we've been passing back and forth during our 90 minute or so dinner meeting.
Given the distance it's not often I see Bob as much as we'd both like to. As a matter of fact it was great to see how fast two of his children have grown up when the happened by, and for me it was fun to orient them on some very good cooking at a lovely little bistro in Paris' 12th district.
Oh did I forget to tell you, I was in Paris for this dinner, but Bob, was still home in New Rochelle, NY and since I was dining alone, and had the laptop with me, I fired up SightSpeed and "had a dinner meeting with Bob."
Since the bistro, Jean-Pierre-Frelet, was pretty much mine at 930 PM in Paris, as Paris is pretty much deserted for the holiday weekend, and because there was an open hotspot with amazing speeds, SightSpeed allowed Bob and family to enjoy a dinner with me, and as a result his wife now has a dinner reservation when she and her sister visit Paris in early 2007. The family that owns the bistro was intrigued, but since they met Bob too, they seemed to chalk me up as a tech savvy dude..Nice...
If you don't believe me. Just ask Bob!
As you know I'm into Working Anywhere, and based on the collaboration which Bob and I had last night, I can feel comfortable knowing I can literally be anywhere working. The SightSpeed video was perfect, the audio better than phone quality and the ability to look over between bites and talk to Bob while dining was a great use of time management. As a responsible board member knowing what's going on is important and beyond reading the MBA Wiki, hearing from Bob always brings more color to things.
Oh and to go one step further, this post is coming to you from the Cafe Du Metro and their SpotCoffee hotspot...you see, Working Anywhere is really easy!
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