A little anecdote: The first time I met Mitch Joel was at a dinner preceding the eMetrics Breakfast a couple of months ago, along with Jim Sterne and Andrea Hadley. I knew who he was: one of the greatest evangelist in the social media/web 2.0 space. He obviously didn't know who I was... But still, when we met again this week at eMetrics Toronto he perfectly remembered about the "link love" from a post I did weeks ago.
We didn't have much time to chat, but here's what I find amazingly interesting: we met face to face only once and despite having thousand of readers and followers in the online social media space, what might be the greatest reward of all is when you can meet and talk face to face with great minds such as Mitch and Avinash Kaushik.
And the opportunity to have dinner with both of them is coming up on April 16th (note: limited seating/pay your own bills). Of course, I quickly sent an email to Mitch to be there!
Like many others, I exchanged emails and blog comments with Avinash several times (how can he find the time to do all of that!). He is even helping me out as an "angel adviser" for WASP and providing invaluable feedback and advices. The first time I met him was at eMetrics San Francisco last year. I was chatting with him while the new version of Google Analytics was being announced on the stage. He was excited like a little child. That's the second greatest thing in our field: we love what we do, we're passionate... we're just like little boys playing Lego :)